Technology is Nature
It seems to me technology is a phenomenon of nature, with no author. It grows rapidly precisely because nobody is in charge of it, or has a means to stop it. Instead, they argue with it as if it were listening to their questions. They frown about it, and exalt in it; make claims for it, even doubt it with absurd philosophic rigour. But they are talking to a stranger. Technology is a deaf, dumb, and blind beast of nature. And when faced with it one has to reckon with the idea that there can be, at the heart of nature, some spirit so wholly experimental. One cannot vainly think it is a human creation to begin with, just needing control at the moment. But technology is a noxious flower, or a type of gleaming alloy, which will eventually rust. Compare it to a mushroom, an insect, or a determined fungus. Realize its alliance with electricity, which was never invented, but discovered. And then gleefully used, taken over as if it had been invented, bragged about by junior scientists, who always celebrate novelty as if it were progress. We have photography, copy machines, computers; all these processes are aspects of nature. Just because technology brings temporarily stunning adaptations of machines, brings frivolity and artifice into the world, doesn’t mean it isn’t, at root and all its branches, nature. Primitive, hard-driving nature!
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The dread form of nature that science cannot control, and which art is attracted to like candy. The white filmy stuff that you don’t recall getting on your hands, like riding the escalator, and which no soap can wash off. The popcorn you got at the multiplex cinema that makes you throw up. Have I said too much? What else is in the gaudy pleasure gardens, I mean the potted plants, of technology? Maybe a little something intravenous. (Lloyd Mintern)
