human being on Wed, 7 Jan 2004 17:19:45 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Aliens Cause Global Warming |
"Advice to Science Students," 1974, Donald P. Geesaman, Ph.D.., in Readings on Science, Technology and Purpose, prepared for the 1982-83 Midcareer Seminar: Education for Reflective Leadership, H.H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, pp. xiv-xv, unpublished. excerpt from: http://strikingdistance.com/sd9701/c3ijan97/gsmith/gsmith1.html So, as I sat in CyberX, face first in a monitor, I began to wonder what the personal costs would be if we continue to allow technologies to run interference with what little remaining personal time and space we have. I was reminded of a statement written in 1974 by Donald P. Geesaman. Geesaman was an outspoken critic of nuclear power plants and the uses of Plutonium in the 1970's. He is portrayed in the movie Silkwood as one of the two scientists that speaks about the dangers of Plutonium to Silkwood's colleagues at her nuclear plant prior to their unionization. He wrote the following shortly after Karen Silkwood's untimely death and the subsequent investigation into its circumstances. It is called "Advice to Science Students." "I sat down last night at eleven o'clock and I asked myself, "If I had only ten minutes to speak to science students what would I tell them," and I decided that I would tell them the following: "I was the son of a country doctor, I grew up in a small, idyllic town in Eastern Nebraska in the 1930's, and I believe that I lived then through a brief Utopia. And as a bright punk kid I went away to college where I learned the rituals and poetry of theoretical physics, and afterwards I worked for many years in the schizoid, surrealistic world of a nuclear weapons laboratory where I was drawn into the politics of its purposes, and where I came to understand the sacraments of modern technology as a desecration of the self. "Now, looking back I recognize that there were elegant languages in science and perfect orderings in technology, but those things seem remote and obvious like the stars, while there are things that are less remote and less obvious that students of science should know. "They should know that the scientific community is for the most part comprised of overspecialized hacks and moral eunuchs indentured to government and industry. "They should know that the technological purpose is in fact the development of aggregates of political and economic power and that the usual form of that development is at best a WPA project, and at worst an ethical abomination. "They should know that the notion of our natural environment is a monstrous fiction, and that in reality we live in a world of human artifacts where things happen largely through the intercession of human intelligence. "They should know that we persist in a pre-fascist political state where we are alienated by the very hegemony of non-participatory democracy that the complexity of our lives forces us to accept. "They should know that we live in a social condition distinguished by information instead of wisdom, consensus instead of intelligence, euphemism instead of awareness, service instead of competence, dependence instead of responsibility. "Much of our social and physical state is a shadow thrown across our lives by our technologies. From conception to death, our lives are becoming mere technological artifacts. We are possessed, subjugated, exiled. "A civilization that perceives technology only as a word in the language of power, is a civilization of many hidden covenants by which the individual and the content of his life are poorly served." http://strikingdistance.com/sd9701/c3ijan97/gsmith/gsmith1.html # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net