An essential quality of technology, from the spear to Skype, is action at a distance. Technology enables us to have an effect on people and things far away. In general, the more advanced the technology, the further away it is able to impose an effect.
Our lives cost the lives of others. That’s always been true, and will be so long as we breathe. Technology allows us to forget this.
As technophiles spew on about a global community, where your value is measured by the number of hits your words register, their hands never touch the blood and feces of the life around them.
You want every child “connected”? So do I. It’s what’s at the other end of the connection that matters.
All children,
every child, should know where the stuff that makes up their bodies comes from, all the way back to the living organisms that fill up, unrecognizable, wrapped in plastic.
All children,
every child, should know where their waste goes, through hidden pipes and trucks that rumble before dawn through the neighborhood once or twice a week.
We can do both, I suppose–just make sure you cover up the machines when I bring in a calf (or whatever the cafeteria is serving this week) to slaughter in the classroom.
I could live without my computer a lot easier than living without my knife.
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