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To: Stitch who wrote (338)	7/4/1998 11:15:00 AM
From: Jerry in Omaha	Respond to of 3536

Stitch, This and the following posting contain an excerpt from the first chapter of Earthwalk, by Philip Slater, pub. 1974. Re-visited in 1998 and compared to the article in Upside, by Michael S.Malone Mr. Slater's book is hauntingly prescient. In two parts: "The Extensions of Man - or - Say Hello to the Nice Fist "Discussions of technology usually point out that tools and machines are extensions of the human organism; the hammer an extension of the fist, the wheel an extension of the foot, the computer an extension of the brain, and so on. Through these extensions, it is said, humanity gains control over its environment. It is true that there are certain unpleasant side effects. People must be more cautious, they say -- plan ahead a bit more. Technology must be controlled: A greater part of technology must be devoted to the problems created by technology, and so on. If this were a psychological problem instead of a social one, the therapist to whom it was brought might tactfully suggest that the difficulty lay in the way the "patient" defined it. Therapists are not usually hopeful that an obsessional patient will achieve serenity by devoting additional hours each day to ordering his thoughts, or that a paranoid patient will achieve security by taking additional precautions against his pursuers, or that a heroin addict will vanquish his dependence on the drug by taking a particularly large dose. The circularity of all out thinking about technology suggests that we are in some way re-creating the problem in our efforts to solve it. To exercise control over the environment limits its freedom to influence us. We act on it in such a way as to make its influence a product, in part, of our own efforts -- that is, we help create the stimulus to which we respond. Control means that we put a bit of us in the environment and then treat it as if it were a wholly independent stimulus. Control thus dulls and deadens our experience. The more we control our enviornment the less possible it is to experience novelty, however avidly we seek it and seek to coerce it. For novelty and freshness cannot be coerced -- cannot be commissioned or scheduled, like a happening. They are dependent for their very for their very existence on our having no control over them. To pursue them is to destroy them. The attempt to control and master the environment thus automatically pollutes it, for it decreases that aspect of the environment that renews, refreshes, surprises, and delights us. The purpose of control is to generate predictability, but predictability is boring as well as secure, fatiguing as well as comforting. Each act of mastery replaces a bit of the environment with a mirror, and a house of mirrors is satisfying only to very sick people. If this were the only form of pollution resulting from our attempts to master the environment, we could probably live with it, and liberal efforts to solve the technology problem with more technology might be endorsed, albeit without much enthusiasm. But the problem is more serious than this. (Continued in the next posting.)