SUNDAY, JUNE 25, 2023: NOTE TO FILE
The Toxicity of Smartphones
On the nature of modern humans
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: ANTHROPOCENE, FROM THE WIRES, EXTINCTION
Abstract: Smartphones may not be making humans smarter. Our exalted technological progress, civilization for that matter, may not be the best thing that ever happened to us. The realization that most modern technology is not remotely sustainable on any scale we consider to be our due, would seem less like the ending of the only life worth living (rapacious consumption of a planet for the taking by omniscient conquerors), than the beginning of a potentially viable form of human (and civilization).
TUCSON (A-P) — Substances mined are not renewable; microchip manufacture depends on a global, intact techno-industrial economy that is not remotely sustainable.
The substances listed are more or less toxic in the sense that it is possible to commit suicide by drinking too much pure water or eating too much gold dust might do it, though I don’t know of anyone who has tried death by gold ingestion. Most e-waste (85%) ends up in landfills, and so won’t kill anyone you know, e.g. posterity unborn.
The list should hint at the complexity of the system that most of modern technology (all digital information technology and information embodied in it) depends on.
To focus on the substances or complexity of manufacture that go into smartphone production and use is a distraction from the psycho-social toxicity of the device (as high-tech poster child) used to do most wanted (as distinct from needed) screen time (our collective grasp of reality is in virtual freefall in a race to the bottom).
Everything we moderns think we know is as asserted. We don’t even know that we know nothing, and so none can iterate towards knowing without knowing (wuzhi or in more recent parlance, Philip Morrison's ‘ring of truth’).
Evidence informs those who would listen, that “all of our exalted technological progress, civilization for that matter, is comparable to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.” [1], i.e. that computers, the internet, cars, planes, trains and the entire modern overcomplex techno-industrialized form of civilization is leading us toward social and ecological implosion. When are we going to recognize that technologies are not going to get us off the techno-industrial hook?
At the very least, technology needs to be regulated by a form of human that is not had (possessed) by technology, which excludes all Anthropocene enthusiasts.
What would be an effective way to persuade people that all technologies have both good and bad side effects, and that by chance most cause more harm than good long term secondary to unforeseen/unforeseeable consequences (e.g. car and smartphone usage)?
If technology will not save industrial civilization from implosion, perhaps the modern form of human could change by ceasing to be the modern form of human (post kicking and screaming phase). This could be by extinction, or by intentionally transitioning from short-term profit maximization of self interest to a condition of loving grace looked over by a matrifocal culture with an enthusiasm for living properly with the planet (Gaia/Mother) within limits as renormalizing humans.
Could any modern human mutate into a seeker of long term solidarity with life on Earth to persist as evolvable K-strategists? Could some humans seek out the condition now that will come anyway (if extinction is avoided)? The next 50 to 500 or 5k years will likely tell that tale.
Asking foundational questions requires having some narrative of human past to present development our future will be an extension of. The modern consensus narrative of human origins and progress are stories based on assertions made in all error, ignorance, and illusion, e.g. tales told by idiots that humans are not mere animals, but the paragon of species, noble in reason, infinite in faculty, in form and moving express and admirable, in action like the better angels of our nature, and in apprehension like a god — the beauty of the cosmos we are the center of.
Of course we are not just animals, we are dysfunctional animals, much as Calhoun’s rats/mice were not normal K-strategists. For over 300k years we were normal K-strategists minding our own evolvable business by living within limits (carrying capacity) until an expansionist form of atavistic (partifocal) human arose some 50k to 60k years ago to expand out of and within Africa to exterminate, among other megafauna, all hominins with the exception of some Hadza, San, and Pygmy.
Says who? Why would anyone think so? For the archaeogenetics data tells us so (over the last 14 years though no Anthropocene enthusiasts can Like or Share this information, much less consider the implications).
A genetically intact Hadza, San, or Pygmy could be reading this (having been assimilated culturally, resistance having proved futile), but not likely. So, dearest reader, you descend from a small group of humans who mutated into an expansionist form of human by thoroughly repudiating what had worked for over six million years to evolve hominins and over 500 million years to evolve their K-strategist ancestors.
An expansionist form of invasive species (or metastatic cancer) is exceptional (for a time). We Anthropocene enthusiasts are exceptional (enjoy your supremacy while you can).
K-strategists have an evolved (selected for) sensitivity to any crossing of the lower carrying capacity limit in the form of stress that selects (GAS, General Adaption Syndrome) for slowing the rate of growth to avoid exceeding the upper limit (overshoot) and degrowth to a condition below the lower limit before experimentally again bumping up against the lower limit.
Modern human expansionists are so devoid of K-strategist culture that none can grasp the condition of living intentionally within limits. Products of r-culture are human centric true believers who as such cannot listen to Nature who has all the answers. K-culture is nature centric to the core because recognizing what works to persist, listening to Mother, is selected for.
Some believe that they can be both human and nature centric, i.e. deny the error, ignorance, and illusion their way of life and knowing is based on. Yes, they can believe whatever they want to, but Nature is unkind. Renormalize or die.
Systems ecologists would have to agree.
I have spoken, but in vain; chattered on and on to no avail,
For what can words say — what can narratives tell —
Of things that have no yesterday, tomorrow, or today.
— Jianzhi Sengcan (aka Seng-Ts’an, ?-606 CE)
