Sustainable and Reasonable Action
By Mark Pesce

What is the message you most want to convey about the interplay between human experience, technology and ecological interdependence?

It is said that technologies are value-neutral; that technology can either be good or bad depending on how it's used, but technologies can never be separated from the cultural context in which they're employed.

Now I've, over the course of my own career, created a number of technologies, which have been brought into current use and one of the things that I understood as I was introducing these technologies was that I had also to introduce examples of how these technologies should be used, because left to themselves, people will pick them up and do one thing or another thing, but if you can give it a push - this is almost like chaos theory, sensitive dependence on initial conditions - if you can give it a push in the right direction, certain ideas or capabilities might accrete around that technology. It's the same as dropping a seed in the soil and choosing whether to water it or to let it take its own natural course.

Information technology is a way of dispersing the results, not only of human communication, but also of computer simulation. These two things together can be a very potent engine for the production of vision around what constitutes ecologically sustainable and ecologically reasonable action.

So, I think that the interrelation between technology and global ecology is specifically what we choose to make of it; that if we have all of this technology, then it becomes a priority for us to say, "Do these technologies aid in our ability to be ecological beings? Do they blind us to it? Do they hypnotize us so we don't think about it? Can they be powerful tools to actually make it present; to help us understand the consequence of our actions?"

Computers are simulators. Information technology is a way of dispersing the results, not only of human communication, but also of computer simulation. These two things together can be a very potent engine for the production of vision around what constitutes ecologically sustainable and ecologically reasonable action.

Radio-V/Ethoschannel Index