How the Tech Monster is killing us at accelerating speeds and what we can do about it

“The Anthropocene is commonly understood as the epoch in which the technological activity of industrialized humanity becomes the dominant factor shaping the Earth and its associated life-supporting systems”.

—Jochem Swier and Vincent Blok, 2019, based on Stephen et al, 2007

THE STORY:

They are everywhere! They are in our gardens and our houses: In our garages, kitchens, family rooms and bathroom cabinets, and often in our bedrooms too. They are in our pockets or on our wrists. They surround us in our working space. They are above us in space and also at sea. They can penetrate the earth and extract precious matter from our mother’s deepest entrails.

Tools are part of our lives at all times and in all places.

As proposed by Aristotle, the part of science that concerns human tools is called technology. Nowadays we tend to confuse the science from its object and speak of technology to mean the actual tools. Today, by “technology”, we even tend to mean only a part of this field such as information technology, sometimes electronics. In this article, I may fall into these cognitive shortcuts myself, so please be mindful.

Technology has become quite complex and sophisticated. It helps us do amazing things such as heart surgery or taking pictures of Mars. Technology helps produce, package, transport and deliver most of the food on our plates in “rich” countries. We say that food is more or less processed, referring to how much transformation this food underwent after leaving its wild, live form. In fact, Tech also helps produce plants without soil.

Transformation: that is a key word. Technology helps take matter or energy in some initial form or state and transform it into another form or state. This process itself uses additional matter and energy. Technology also helps transform the tools themselves when we think they must be improved. In fact, in the so called “e-economy”, or “tech” sector, many innovations only exist to solve problems that were created by previous tech products. Our software keeps being fixed of its own bugs, upgrading, or “integrating” with other software. Our hardware keeps changing in the name of better efficiency, performance, easier multitasking, user friendliness, or to solve yet another intrinsic problem or fulfill yet another need we are told we have.

We do all this because we believe it is beneficial to us. We tend to think that we will be happier if our needs are fulfilled. But are those our needs?

The technological chain of problem to solution to new problem to new solution has become so long and multibranched that most of us have completely forgotten why exactly we needed tools or tech in the first place. A large portion of our tech is managed by the Tech Monster, who manages us more than we manage it, who feeds itself from our weaknesses and is getting bigger by the day. The sustainability industry is no exception – in fact, it seems to be a particularly fertile industry for the Tech Monster to thrive.

Is all of technology truly “for the better”? What good exactly is being produced or enhanced? Are we also seeing the bad and the worse? Are we fully conscious of our growing dependency on tools and technology and all of its consequences? Just how much do we need all these tools and tech, and what for?

 

THE PROBLEM:

Interestingly, a few centuries into the industrialization era, not only are we not happier overall but, as one global report after another keeps informing us, and despite some notable improvements, key economic, social, and environmental indicators have been worsening exponentially. See for example this summary of the latest IPCC Report. Our very survival as a species is being seriously threatened.

Even worse in my view: In the name of sustainability, many tend to rush to “tech solutions” that may solve one problem in one area but also create other, often bigger, problems in several other areas, or export the same problem to other industries. Electric cars, for example, are built mostly to avoid carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere but they use unsustainable quantities of matter and energy to be made, used, and disposed of, and are dependent on other unsustainable industries. Also, changing a few aspects of car technology does not by itself reduce the number of cars built and used. In fact, the opposite can often be observed where people buy more or bigger cars thinking “it’s OK now”, when what we really need is to reduce our car dependency overall. Similar issues occur with solar and wind technologies.

“Tech startups”, and those who invest in or otherwise serve these startups, are invading the sustainability (and all) industry. So how can we discern the mostly good from the mostly bad ones and stay away from sin?

First, let’s remember that we resort to tech only because we believe it improves our lives. Let’s see if this is true.

I closely monitored my own usage of information and other technology in the past few years and discovered that the problem was, in a few cases, my own deficient time management. In these cases, I came to see clearly that I had been looking for (external) “tech solutions” to my (internal) “efficiency problems”. And of course, I would (appear to) find them in all sorts of “productivity apps” and their “smooth integrations”, basically falling for the bait in ad messaging, only to find myself more overwhelmed, more stressed, spending more time solving more problems than ever before … and having less money in my wallet. In all these cases I had rushed too quickly to a solution that wasn’t one. Impulse: don’t we all know that!

Over the years I have observed that the same toxic human pattern that leads to bureaucracy also leads to technocracy: our thinking somehow gets short circuited to believe that more of it will free us from it. We repeat and intensify the same pattern while believing we are changing for the better. We project our inner issues on external realities, only in fact creating problems or making existing ones bigger, with compounding effects.

The countries with the highest levels of technology in sophistication and usage are also the ones with the highest negative impact on nature – wild or transformed, human or non-human, often exported. They are also the countries with the highest income and formal education years per capita. Those correlations should give us pause.

In the (unofficial) era which is said to have followed after the Holocene, baptized the Anthropocene, “commonly understood as the epoch in which the technological activity of industrialized humanity becomes the dominant factor shaping the Earth and its associated life-supporting systems”, we seem to insist on solving our problem with the same thought system that created it. Well, that is not possible.

In fact, it is suicide. We end up going in the opposite direction of what we truly want when we fixate on, or become addicted to a certain paradigm. All must flow and change, including paradigms. Among other human addictions, we seem to be insatiably addicted to the Tech Monster and that too must change.

It is the way we, human beings, typically think – and thus typically behave – that needs questioning and fixing before we automatically, impulsively, seek another external tool or solution. We must question and fix our own inner programming first: our mind’s motherboard, the operating system of our mind.

For we are the puppeteer of the Tech Monster puppet.

 

THE SUSTAINABLE SOLUTION:

“A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels”, wrote Albert Einstein in a telegram published by The New York Times on May 25, 1946 (Tom McFarlane in Quora). Einstein was particularly referencing the danger of the atomic power in the hands of mankind.

Einstein certainly walked the talk and led by example in regard to thinking, and then thinking some more! So how should our human mind change so that we can take up the sustainability challenge?

Sustainability is not just about solving one problem in one area, with or without a piece of tech. It is not even about just problem-solving. Even systems thinking, another necessary faculty for achieving sustainability, is not sufficient. Having and monitoring indicators in each and all of the 17 categories of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, is also insufficient.

We cannot be sustainable in isolation of everybody and everything else as this contradicts the very concept of sustainability.

Sustainability is a wholistic, all-encompassing concept: it is about conscious systemic co-optimization which involves dealing with the whole and the parts concomitantly. It requires us to consider and integrate all of reality – both our inner and outer realities -and all our scientific disciplines, as an individual and as a whole. This calls for a way of thinking, feeling, and doing at a much higher and universal level of consciousness than humanity, as a collective, has ever been capable of.

Being sustainable is being able to align with, live and evolve according to the laws of nature and of life, which together expand and diversify life.

Alas, according to the latest global report from the IPBES (the IPCC equivalent in the area of biological diversity) the opposite seems to be happening: Life overall and its diversity appear to be reducing at unprecedented rates.

Among other ways and steps to include and integrate, humanity must be able to navigate polarities, where one consciously sees, knows, accepts, and organizes to minimize a certain amount of something (say, work and effort) and also consciously sees, knows, and organizes to maximize its polar opposite (say, rest and recreation). This type of thinking requires sufficient reflection time, as opposed to the impulsive “all or nothing”, “black or white”, polarized mindset that can run human beings by default. And we must apply this reflective approach to as many concepts as possible if we want to consistently act inclusively. I recommend the work and teachings of Barry Johnson for that purpose. I also recommend the work of Daniel Kahneman, including his famous book, Thinking Fast and Slow.

So, what are some of the poles we may encounter in tech thinking?

Many (most?) of us do not think that technology is part of nature. We tend to think there is nature on one side, and human beings and their tools and tech, and the products of tech, on the other. Well, that thought pattern is an example of fragmented and polarized thinking. There is nothing else but nature. Human beings are part of nature and so is technology. Everything transforms in nature. Many life forms use tools and considerably more build dwellings and exoskeletons. Human beings have just become way too intense about that in the past century. “Frantic” would be a better word. So frantic that we often cross over into the excessive “against nature” category. Because nature also includes all poles, it is natural to, at times, go against nature. Our own natural bodies oscillate between ease and tension precisely to help us navigate polarities. Too much tension leads to death, and too much ease as well.

Tools and technology are made by humans to prolong, replace, enhance, and multiply human behavior. Like anything else tech can be used for the good or for the bad. Currently, concerning the economic, social, and environmental indicators that are in the red and worsening, we can deduct that the human behavior behind these indicators is being mostly destructive, and that the technology associated with those – being a multiplier of human behavior – is making things worse, at times considerably.

In the sustainability field, many speak of “nature-based solutions” as opposed to man-made (which would involve tech). Indeed, how efficient is it to transform something natural that works perfectly to provide needed services without or with very little human intervention into an imperfect thing that we will depend on fueling, maintaining, and constantly upgrading for the rest of our lives (if we live long enough) and – I must say it again – has now destroyed and replaced the initial perfect, self-maintained, natural living thing? More than inefficient, it is insane.

And yet we know it is not realistic or desirable to live without technology. Technology does help to expand life in many ways too. So, where is the point at which we go too far and cross over from the Tech Angel to the Tech Monster? And can we prevent ourselves from crossing over?

The key – and the challenge for sustainability professionals who are typically over focused on external realities – is to connect with and monitor our inner body sensations alongside our inner thoughts while observing external realities and remain, in that way, super aware. When we are able to consciously interrupt our impulses and question our thoughts, when we take enough time to reflect honestly, and act accordingly, we are sustainable.

Please help sustainability professionals expand life by sharing your experience:

Where do you feel technology in your life today expands you and all of life overall, and makes you and others truly happier, and where does it enslave you and make you miserable and compete with others and life? (Remember: Your inner sensations of ease and tension will guide you to find the answer).

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