When I told her that I haven’t owned a television since the late 90s, I killed my Facebook account last year, I've never tweeted (bleated?) in my life, and although I have a cell phone, I don’t carry it with me and only use it to talk to my daughter and granddaughter who live 2000 miles away, she said I was just being stupid and making myself irrelevant.
And she is right, I suppose—about making myself irrelevant, that is. People have relevance only in terms of their role within the machine of civilization. From inside the machine, the machine is the only frame of reference from which to assess relevance. It is the only frame of reference, period.
But to resist technology is to begin to disengage in the most mechanical sense of the word, to separate from the flywheel, to uncouple from the gears. And something very interesting happens to your frame of reference in the process. A redundant and easily replaceable sprocket has very little relevance while its cogs are neatly embedded in the chain. But pull that same sprocket off its bearings and twist it a little sideways...
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OK, stop with the bullshit. It isn’t enough to reduce your personal dependence on technology. I think some level of disengagement is probably necessary in order to get a glimpse of what is really going on. But personal enlightenment is not going to change anything. It is not enough to refuse to play the game. We need to smash the game table and burn all of the pieces.
Yep, you took the words...well, the thoughts right out of my mo...uhm, right out of my mind...:
ReplyDelete"It isn’t enough to reduce your personal dependence on technology. I think some level of disengagement is probably necessary in order to get a glimpse of what is really going on. But personal enlightenment is not going to change anything. It is not enough to refuse to play the game. We need to smash the game table and burn all of the pieces."