Posted by Cromwell on March 15, 2001 at 06:49:47 PM EST:
In Reply to: Re: Enfin! posted by Paul Sirois on March 15, 2001 at 04:31:17 AM EST:
Technology in itself is neutral, it's its use which can be not neutral or the choice of technology A versus technology B which is not neutral. All the developments and innovations in the technologies have been conceived in the interests of the powerful but onall sooner or later have been subverted by the dominated to be used against the arbitrary of the powerfuls. Reread history! You'll see it happened again and again. That's why you see sometimes curious bedfellows, pure reactionnaries with revolutionnaries allied against some sort of progress. Look at the Greens in Germany at their beginnings: they discovered with some sort of stupor that besides a majority of left-leaning supporters they had a non negligible fraction of extreme rigth conservatives, some of them clearly influenced by national-socialism. That's not without reasons that the situationists (I don't remember exactly in which number of IS) invited the revolutionnares to invest the sector of research to orient the future and not to accept it blindly. The main problem with people like Bove, Riesel, Zerzan (you can add Dehoux too) is not what they are against, they have a lot of good and clever reasons to be against the world
as it is and you may agree with their revolt for a lot of reasons, but is you can read them as much as you want you don't see what they are for, what is the future they envision once they'll have destroyed the modern technology condemned to death as the monstruous child of capitalism. No technology is a chid, it's not because its parents are perverts that he kid is a pervert too. If you care to give him enough attention, it will grow like a nice and well equilibrated person. Yes IBM is a pure capitalistic enterprise, yes the technology of IBM was used to help to exterminate Jews, yes IBM products were and are still used to consolidate and reinforce the new world order (the new politically correct name of this good ole yankee imperialism) but now suppose that the technological progress initiated by IBM doesn't exist ... Think about it. To start with, we would be unable to reflect (or at least to try to do it when we are not too disturbed by you know who, on the best ways to subvert the world on this precise website... and I'm sure it's not the only advantage that you and me extorted from technology.