~ Another entry in the Mad Jubilado series ~
Palpable fear, justified if misdirected anger, and xenophobic demagoguery have Trumped American democracy, even in its degraded form within the corporate state.
With the powerful influence of the fossil-fuel industry, largely through Koch-brothers’ and similar front groups, neo-fascists and white supremacists have penetrated the U.S. politics and that of other industrial nations as well. Driven by extreme racist nationalism, they are manipulated by the corporate powers that dominate democratic institutions at national and state levels of government. These extremists have made significant inroads.
What’s a Mad Jubilado to do? What is anyone with a semblance of democratic values to do to redirect politics to serve the public interest when the corporate elite has exerted so much power across the nation? Citizens remain all caught up in the oppressive if comfortable industrial consumerism that supports what Dmitri Orlov calls the “technosphere” in his book, Shrinking the Technosphere: Getting a Grip on the Technologies that Limit Our Autonomy, Self-Sufficiency, and Freedom.
The Technosphere and its Illusions
Orlov writes with biting sarcasm and stark realism about the global techno-industrial system run wild. The technosphere is an “anti-Gaia,” self-perpetuating artificial non-organic complex adaptive system. It is driven by its own growth imperative and the need to replace the biosphere with itself. Of course, unless we overcome the technosphere it will destroy the biosphere and its human creators and slaves as well, as its growth surges toward collapse.
Credit: Zooky World – WordPress.com
Orlov grew up in Leningrad, USSR, and emigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s, so he has a special sense of oppressive systems. Combined with his experience in computer engineering, linguistics, high-energy physics, internet commerce, network security, and advertising, his mindfulness of human-produced self-aggrandizing systems is unique.
Some artificial intelligence (AI) experts believe that AI-controlled automated systems can eventually reproduce, eliminating the need for their human inventors. Famed technologist Ray Kurzweil even asserts an inevitable technological transcendence of human biology in his book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Such minds live entirely in the technosphere. In contrast, Orlov hopes that humanity can gradually shrink the technosphere to bring it back under control so that the biosphere, including us, can survive.
Grounding Communities in the Biosphere
National politics is now a pawn of Trumpery and all the Earth System plunder that entails. Even liberal opponents retain their faith in the technosphere as a harbinger of progress. Therefore, to realize Orlov’s hope and our own, we must turn to the remaining spheres of power over which we can exert some control. Many who fear the growing tyranny of the technosphere, as well as its political anti-Nature enabler, Trumplandia, are turning to local electoral politics and civic action.
Their efforts focus on influencing the passage of local ordinances that can protect communities and ecologies from the destructive actions of the technosphere. Their efforts would replace extractive industrial high-energy technologies with human-scale appropriate technologies that can work in harmony with the ecosystems they inhabit.
More on asserting the rights of community and Nature over destruction by the technosphere in a subsequent post.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 