The Future Does Not Compute

On Being Responsible for Earth

This is Chapter 5 of The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, by Stephen L. Talbott. Copyright 1995 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved. You may freely redistribute this chapter in its entirety for noncommercial purposes. For information about the author's online newsletter, NETFUTURE: Technology and Human Responsibility, see http://www.netfuture.org/.

Jerry Mander thinks we should trash computers, along with much of the rest of modern technology. He is, I think, as close to being right as one can get while being crucially, tragically wrong.

Mander's In The Absence Of The Sacred -- The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations is a profoundly important book, and I would give much to guarantee its broad dissemination throughout our society. One can scarcely participate responsibly in contemporary discussions of technology while willfully ignoring Mander's broad thesis.

We need to see ourselves

Technology, Mander tells us, is not neutral; it has a mind of its own. The same goes for businesses; the corporation, which Mander rightly likens to a machine, is driven by an unconsidered compulsion to grow, and is biased toward the profitable employment of new technology, regardless of the social consequences. Those consequences -- whether we're talking about the telephone, the television, or genetic engineering -- are rarely visible during the early stages of development. Nor is there any realistic public ...