Towards a Liberatory Technology | The Anarchist Library

Toggle navigation

Search

Table of Contents

Archive

Titles

Authors

Topics

Latest entries

Popular Texts

Add a new text

More

About the project

Live Chat (IRC/Matrix)

Tor Onion Services

Bookshelf (wiki)

Donate

SHH! THIS IS A LIBRARY! (forums)

Librarian Picks

Other languages

Anarhistička biblioteka

Det Anarkistiske Bibliotek (Danish)

Anarchistische Bibliothek (German)

Det Anarkistiska Biblioteket (Swedish)

Bibliothèque Anarchiste (French)

Библиотека Анархизма (Russian)

De Anarchistische Bibliotheek (Dutch)

Анархистичка библиотека (Macedonian)

Biblioteca anarchica (Italian)

Η Αναρχική Βιβλιοθήκη (Greek)

Anarcho-Biblioteka (Polish)

Anarkistinen kirjasto (Finnish)

Anarşist Kütüphane (Turkish)

Biblioteca anarquista (Spanish)

無政府主義図書館 (Japanese)

South Asian Anarchist Library

Esperanto Anarchist Library

Southeast Asian Anarchist Library

Anarchista könyvtár

아나키스트 도서관 (Korean)

Anarchistická knihovna

Biblioteca Anarhistă

中文无治主义图书馆 (Chinese)

Biblioteca Anarquista (Portugese)

Biblioteka-Anarkiste (Albanian)

Liburutegi Anarkista (Basque)

کتابخانه‌ی آنارشیستی (Farsi)

Bookbuilder

Mobile applications

RSS feed

Random

Add a new text

Close

Table of Contents

Close

Title:

Towards a Liberatory Technology

Author:

Murray Bookchin

Topics:

post-scarcity,<br>social ecology,<br>technology,<br>transhumanism

Date:

May 1965

Source:

http://www.revoltlib.com/anarchism/towards-a-liberatory-technology-part-2/view.php

Notes:

Lewis Herber is pseudonym of Murray Bookchin

plain PDF

A4 imposed PDF

Letter imposed PDF

EPUB (for mobile devices)

Standalone HTML (printer-friendly)

XeLaTeX source

plain text source

Source files with attachments

Edit this text

Add this text to the bookbuilder

Select individual parts for the bookbuilder

Lewis Herber

Towards a Liberatory Technology

TECHNOLOGY AND FREEDOM

THE POTENTIALITIES OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY

THE NEW TECHNOLOGY AND THE HUMAN SCALE

THE ECOLOGICAL USE OF TECHNOLOGY

TECHNOLOGY FOR LIFE

Not since the days of the Industrial Revolution have popular attitudes toward technology fluctuated as sharply as in the past few decades. During most of the twenties,and even well into the thirties, public opinion generally welcomed technological innovation and identified man's welfare with the industrial advances of the time. This was a period when Soviet apologists could justify Stalin's most brutal methods and worst crimes merely by describing him as the "industrializer" of modern Russia. It was also a period when the most effective critique of capitalist society could rest on the brute facts of economic and technological stagnation in the United States and Western Europe. To many people there seemed to be a direct, one-to-one relationship between technological advances and social progress; a fetishism of the word "industrialization"excused the most abusive of economic plans and programs.

Today, we would regard these attitudes as naive. Except perhaps for the technicians and scientists who design the"hardware," the feeling of most people toward techno-logical innovation could be described as schizoid, divided into a gnawing fear of nuclear extinction on the one hand,and a yearning for material abundance, leisure and security on the other. Technology, too, seems to be at odds with itself. The bomb is pitted against the power reactor, the intercontinental missile against the communications satellite. The same technological discipline tends to appear both as a foe and a friend of humanity, and even traditionally human-oriented sciences, such as medicine, occupy an ambivalent position—as witness the promise of advances in chemotherapy and the threat created by research in biological warfare.

It is not surprising to find that the tension between promise and threat is increasingly being resolved in favor of threat by a blanket rejection of technology. To an ever-growing extent, technology is viewed as a demon, imbued with a sinister life of its own, that is likely to mechanize man if it fails to exterminate him. The deep pessimism this view produces is often as simplistic as the optimism that prevailed in earlier decades. There is a very real danger that we will lose our perspective toward technology, that we will neglect its liberatory tendencies, and, worse, submit fatalistically to its use for destructive ends. If we are not to be paralyzed by this new form of social fatalism, a balance must be struck.

The purpose of this article is to explore three questions.What is the liberatory potential of modern technology, both materially and spiritually? What tendencies, if any,are reshaping the machine for use in an organic, human-oriented society? And finally, how can the new technology and resources be used in an ecological manner—that is, to promote the balance of nature, the full development of natural regions, and the creation of organic, humanistic communities?

The emphasis in the above remarks...