WHAT SORT OF FUTURE ARE WE LEAVING BEHIND?

Climatologists may overwhelmingly (the exact figure is some 97%) be convinced that global warming is a real and immediate threat - but the public is not so easily persuaded. Our reasons are many and diverse

• The world's climate tends to go in cycles – remember the Ice ages

• experts are increasingly suspect – their forecasts often turn out to be falsified

• technological innovations will save us

Beneath such rationalisations lies an almost religious belief in the idea of “Progress” which has recently become the subject of increasing criticism

As individuals, we deal with the threat of global warming in a whole variety of different ways -

• we deny it

• we mobilise and protest

• we accept fatalistically that future generations are doomed and feel guilty

• we invent a new vocabulary – of “resilience”

• and resort to notions of local self-sufficiency” and “degrowth”

This post is about two climate activists whose writing has engaged my interest in the last few days – Rupert Read and Jem Bendell. Read is one of the founders of Extinction Revolution but has just left his posiyion as a philosophy academic to concentrate on his activism. Bendell is a geographer who has edited a book jointly with Read

Let me start with Read's latest book - Why Climate Breakdown Matters (2022) which starts with reminding us of the anxieties we had in earlier decades

Not so well known is that in 1983, we came even closer to nuclear war. This was instigated by a flock of geese flying across the edge of the Soviet Union. The USSR’s radar systems misidentified this avian excursion as a series of incoming nuclear missiles. It was only due to the prompt action, or (if you will) inaction, of an intelligent and calm Russian officer (not even a very senior officer), that nuclear missiles weren’t released in response to those geese. Against protocol, he delayed authorizing a retaliatory strike, until the looming threat was unmasked as simply birds. This episode is documented in a film called “The Man Who Saved the World” and the title is apposite: he did.....

Thankfully, Read's book is a short one. We are so overwhelmed with books on the subject (and many others) that I have several times appealed to writers and publishers to discipline themselves and give us shorter books (ideally half his length!). But because its a recent book, it's able to trawl over the writing of the past four decades on the issue and identify their shortcomings -

While discussion of the science is abundant, discussion of the social, political and economic ramifications of taking the science fully seriously is typically far more marginalized. For instance, most of ‘Political Science’ and of Sociology still simply ignore the way that the ecological crisis will entirely transform our world in the lifetime of students now studying these subjects at university. Browsing through the latest issues of top philosophy journals reveals a similar lacuna in the discipline, with some notable exceptions. This is insupportable and unethical. But it is part of a wider trend.

And why has there been so little focus on adaptation in climate activism, climate politics, and climate science? Adaptation is creeping steadily up the international agenda, but is still not being taken anywhere near as seriously as mitigation/prevention.

Most books on the subject are equivocal about future prospects but Read is emphatic that we are far beyond the tipping point - hence the emphasis on adaptation. He stresses the need to think about our children and the importance of future generations

Conventional wisdom in mainstream climate activism has until recently – until the game-changing advent of the likes of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion – said that if we direct people’s attention to the scale and severity of present and impending ecological collapse, then they will abandon all hope in the face of it and will fail to act against it. The consensus has largely been that messages of hope and progress motivate, while those of impending catastrophe and failure demotivate and alienate otherwise receptive audiences. In short, put on a happy face (p16)

Social responses we can expect to emerge as the intensity and frequency of disasters is amplified – as it will be. I draw on the work of disaster studies scholars that shows that the popular narrative of these events as a catalyst for the worst elements of our nature is (thankfully) hugely inaccurate. Instead, thoughtful and attentive empirical research suggests that disasters are often the scene of intense community building. This shatters an important cultural myth about human nature. More importantly, it is also a source of real hope for fast changes in our attitudes to climate breakdown. It may be that from the aftermath of disasters we can seize renewed vigour for creating a better and more resilient world. (p21)

An important theme which occurs in the book is that of challenging our obsession with economics growth - and leads me to the subject of degrowth which has been the subject of some challenging books eg Post-Growth – life after capitalism; by Tim Jackson

During the year 2020, the world witnessed the most extraordinary experiment in non-capitalism that we could possibly imagine. We now know that such a thing is not only possible. It’s essential under certain circumstances. The goal of this book is to articulate the opportunities that await us in this vaguely glimpsed hinterland. (p12) Post Growth is an invitation to learn from history

Beyond the ‘fairytales of economic growth’ lies a world of complexity that demands our attention. Those fairytales are coded into the guidance manual of the modern economy. They’ve been there for decades. They continue to distort our understanding of social progress and prevent us from thinking more deeply about the human condition.

The broad thesis of this book is that good lives do not have to cost the earth. Material progress has changed our lives –in many ways for the better. But the burden of having can obscure the joy of belonging. The obsession with producing can distort the fulfilment of making. The pressure of consuming can undermine the simple lightness of being. Recovering prosperity is not so much about denial as about opportunity.

Robert Kennedy's Kansas speech attacking growth

That single number ‘measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country’, concluded Kennedy. ‘It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.’.....

JS Mill was saying that a postgrowth world may be a richer, not a poorer, place for all of us. And it’s that vision of a richer, more equitable, more fulfilling world – glimpsed by Mill and demanded by Kennedy and developed by Daly – which provides the inspiration for the arguments in this book.

There's a great conversation with Jackson here and a critique of the book here

Let me end with a superb post from my favourite blogger about the chaos which seems to be descending on us all

In ‘chaotic’ economic and political systems that means oligopolies, bribes, extortion and other ‘officially illegal’ activities may prevail without limit. In some cases, organized crime actually substitutes its own laws, rules and constraints, to deal with the chaos.

What I think we are starting to see this century is gradually increasing levels of chaos in much of the world. In fact, the increasing number of the world’s economies that are dominated by oligopolies and organized crime might actually be a little less chaotic than countries that are still trying to play by the rules. In countries ruled by oligarchs and organized crime, you at least know who you have to pay off, and how much, and the consequences if you don’t. That may be despotic, but it isn’t chaos.

If the system collapses to the point that even oligopolies and organized crime cannot maintain order, then you have at least short-term chaos and possibly anarchy. Immediately, in order to get essential things done (like food and energy diThe Future is Degrowth A Vetter and J Vansint 2022stribution), ad hoc systems will emerge.

Resource

 a review of degrowth literature (2022) 

 Deep Adaptation – navigating the realities of climate chaos ed J Bendell and R Read (2021)

Rethinking Readiness – a brief guide to 21^st century megadisasters 2020

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii128/articles/kenta-tsuda-naive-questions-0n-degrowth 2021

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii115/articles/mark-burton-peter-somerville-degrowth-a-defence.pdf 2019

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii112/articles/robert-pollin-de-growth-vs-a-green-new-deal 2018

Previous posts on the issue

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/08/climate-change.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2014/07/why-we-disagree-on-wicked-problems.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/08/climate-change.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/11/is-patriotism-answer.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2022/08/why-polarisation-and-what-can-be-done.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/07/oberheated.html

And a newsflash https://bylinetimes.com/2023/09/06/courts-to-face-wave-of-protests-as-climate-campaigners-say-right-to-jury-trial-under-attack/

ON BIAS

There is a lot of talk in the UK of bias in reporting – whether it's the BBC or simple journalism. The reality is that it's very difficult to find examples of left-wing reporting – although the last post suggested we need to be cautious about this left-right classification, So I've attempted one of my famous TABLES which leads me to conclude that left-wing writing is very much a minority pursuit. But because the blogger site makes a mess of my tables I've attached the table as a pdf file - although I seem somehow to have succeeded in putting it below

People will note that I've drawn my net widely and included some bloggers – as well as someone no longer with us but whose ideas live on. The more names I added to the list, the more difficult it became to apply a suitable label about their “political leaning”

Some years ago I did an even more exhaustive list of good “journalistic” writers which readers may find interesting. It includes a fair number of writers who (in Hamlet's famous phrase) have shuffled off this mortal coil eg Arthur Koestler

Journalists have a reputation for digging up the dirt on people and institutions but John Harris (who figures in the latest table) is unusual in having started a series which celebrates the people doing good work in their UK communities

Writers I respect

	Normal source	Political leaning	Examples and COMMENT
Anthony Barnett	Open Democracy	liberal	A founder of “Open Democracy” and a writer famous for his long essays eg Out of the Belly of Hell (2020) but has also published several books on constitutional issues and on Brexit
Grace Blakely	Tribune	Harder left	Her many contributions can be read at the link at the title of the journal
Diana Coyle	Her blog and academia	liberal	British economist. Author of 9 books eg “Cogs and Monsters”
Matt Flinders	academia	liberal	British political scientist eg Flinders on democracy and a marvellous collection of his blogs in “What Kind of Democracy is this?” See also “Defending Politics”
David Graeber	Academia and activist	anarchist	Sadly David is no longer with us – here is my tribute
John Michael Greer	Current and previous blog	sceptic	One of the most stimulating US writers about the decline of industrial society eg “After Oil” and “The Ecotechnic future” with a strange interest in ancient druidry. This is his take on climate warming
Chris Grey	His brexit blog – and academia	open-minded	British organisational sociologist and author of several non-fiction books – on his subject and also on Brexit
John Harris	The Guardian	open-minded	Also famous for his “Anywhere but Westminster” videos
Chris hedges	Consortium news and his substack	left	Incisive, hard-hitting analyses of the reality of the American Empire
Anton Jaeger	New Left Review	left	His various pieces can be read here
David Jamieson	Conter	Soft left	The Conter site is “Against the Scottish Establishment”. David is its editor and host of its podcast
Owen Jones	The Guardian	Soft left	Author of several books eg “The Establishment”
Naomi Klein	various	open	Canadian writer and activist eg This Changes Everything
Andrew Marr	The New Statesman	liberal	Author of “The Making of Modern Britain”
James Meek	LRB	liberal	Author of several fiction books and of a couple of non-fiction
George Monbiot	The Guardian	Vaguely anarchist	Author of several books eg “Out of the Wreckage”
John Naughton	The guardian	Not clear	The paper's technology correspondent. Writer and academic. Author of several books including “From Gutenberg to Zuckenberg”
Dave Pollard	His blog	Diff to label	Dave is a Canadian – this a very useful post about what motivates him
David Runciman	London Review of Books (LRB)	liberal	David is a British political scientist with many books eg “How Democracy Ends” and “The Confidence Trap”
Jonathan Shafi	Conter site	Soft left	A Scottish free-lance writer
Wolfgang Streeck	New Left Review	Harder left	Wolfgang is a German sociologist and author of numerous important books eg “How will capitalism End?” and “Buying Time”
Gillian Tett	Various – inc Fin Times	Diff to label	Another anthropologist who has turned to financial journalism and author of several books eg “The Silo Effect”
Polly Toynbee	The Guardian	Centre leftist	Author of several non-fiction books eg “Dismembered”

CAN LABOUR WIN?

A recent post identified a widespread despondency indeed cynicism about contemporary British politics. Some forty years ago, there was a mood of hope - John Smith had commissioned the “Commission on Social Justice” Will Hutton was just about to publish his seminal text “The State We’re In”. John Major and the Tories may have won the election in 1992 but Black Wednesday a few months later destroyed the Conservatives' credibility – although they limped on before the overwhelming Labour victory of 1997.

Today there is little hope – the Labour party inspires little confidence, is seen as just too responsible not least for its expulsion of most of its left-wing critics. Just compare the party's 2017 Manifesto with its current “Covenant”.

Renewal is a soft-left journal (the link explains the term which publishes thoughtful articles and this one is a review of a recent book with the great title “Futures of Socialism - ‘Modernisation’, the Labour Party and the British Left, 1973-97”. This excerpt gives a great sense of an intensity of debate which has been lost in recent decades -

His book is a deeply researched history of ideological change on the British left in the late twentieth century. Murphy offers a fascinating guide to the debates about how to modernise socialism that raged across seminar rooms, conference floors, party documents, think tank pamphlets and periodical pages from the 1970s onwards. His findings make a powerful case against the commonplace portrayal of Labour in the late twentieth century as offering nothing more adventurous than a mildly humanised neoliberalism........

During the 1970s and 1980s a very large number of political actors on the left and centre of British politics became convinced that the model of centralised state-driven socialism associated with Labour’s heyday in power in the 1940s was out of step with modern Britain. Political formations as various as the New Left, leading trade unionists, disillusioned Labour revisionists, left-led Labour councils, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, the Liberal Party and the emergent SDP all agreed that there needed to be greater economic and political empowerment below the level of the UK state. Initially this was often framed in socialist terms as the extension of economic democracy through worker participation in industrial decision-making and trade unionists taking seats on company boards. But these ideas quickly widened (or perhaps moderated) to include passing power on to consumer and community groups, local councils (with Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council as a model) and co-operatives. At a theoretical level, these decentralising tendencies were forged into what Murphy dubs the ‘neo-corporatism’ advocated by David Marquand and Paul Hirst. Marquand and Hirst envisaged a British economy that looked a lot more like the West German social-market model, by combining federal constitutionalism with a more collaborative and long-term industrial culture.

All of this was premised on the assumption that Labour’s traditional political vision was too top-down and statist and thus out of step with a less deferential, more individualist society. This was said to be the vulnerability in Labour’s earlier model of socialism that Thatcherism had exploited, by offering a right-wing vision of individual economic empowerment that widened private property ownership and increased disposable incomes through direct tax cuts (a point that had been presciently made by Stuart Hall even before the Thatcher government was elected in his famous 1979 Marxism Today essay ‘The Great Moving Right Show’).

Four quadrants can be used to plot the old and new left and right -

Old Left; supporting a strong state sector for infrastructure and health (inc insurance although the religious and cooperative sectors could equally have responsibility for this last)

Old Right; recognizing the role of the state in sustaining property rights and traditional ways of doing things

New Left; which has supported the liberation struggles of repressed groups and the onward march of post-modernism….

New Right; which tends to divide strongly between the economic agenda of the Neo-liberals (whose eulogies for “the market” conceals support oligopolistic licence and the spread of “commodification”) and the more traditional social agenda of the American Neo-Cons.

But how long can we keep using the term “new”? The UK “New Left” some 60 years ago – and the “New right” at Mont Pelerin a decade earlier.. e are surely, therefore, overdue another term…..and the one I suggest is “emergent”  (which Mintzberg, I think it was, first used to distinguish one meaning of strategy). And, as few people relish being labelled as either left or right, we need a mid-way point for them….That then gives a 3x3 matrix and the question is what terms to use for the resultant combinations……??? This is what I’ve come up with

key words/symbols for the various points of the political spectrum

	LEFT	CENTRE	RIGHT
OLD	Working class	Family, property	Tradition, duty
SOFT	Social democracy	liberalism	duty
NEW	Liberation struggle	consumerism	The individual
EMERGENT	The commons	identity	libertarian

In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands Scruton attacks the left idea of thought for a cause, ‘politics with a GOAL’.

‘Conservatives are by their nature people who are trying to defend and maintain existence without a cause’. Simply to keep things as they are? ‘We obviously all want to change things, but recognise that human life is an end in itself and not a means to replace itself with something else. And defending institutions and compromises is a very difficult and unexciting thing. But nevertheless it’s the truth.’

Scruton’s is not the only book this year to explore “the culture wars”. A site I must consult more often is the Society for US Intellectual History which carried recently an interesting comparison of a couple of books which throw light on all this -

‘Ideas moved first in the arena of economic debate.’ Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the dominant tropes in economics had been institutional, even among conservatives. Right-wing critics of the welfare state and state-managed economies did not speak of the market; they spoke of corporations and banks and ‘championed the rights of management and the productive powers of the free enterprise “system”.’

The idea of the market that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s – ‘self-equilibrating, instantaneous in its sensitivities and global in its reach, gathering the wants of myriad individuals into its system of price signals in a perpetual plebiscite of desires’ – dispensed with these settings and constraints.

It also dismantled the ‘troubling collective presence and demands’ of social democracy, turning unions, workers and the unemployed ‘into an array of consenting, voluntarily acting individual pieces’.

Everyone became a buyer or seller, everything – kidneys, pollution – got bought and sold. The only thing holding it all together was the magnetic energy of these individual acts of exchange. Like most scholars of the free-market movement, Rodgers assigns great weight to Milton Friedman, ‘the University of Chicago’s most forceful politiciser’, and the right’s answer to J.K. Galbraith. He wrote columns for Newsweek, advised presidents (and dictators), and organised the ten-part PBS series Free to Choose as a counter to Galbraith’s 15-part BBC series on capitalism.

With his focus on the money supply as the source of economic well-being, Friedman helped popularise a ‘radically simplified model of aggregate economic behaviour’, in which ‘state, society and institutions all shrank into insignificance within a black box that translated money inputs directly into price outputs.’

But Friedman’s monetarism was also far more state-centric – the Federal Reserve played an almost heroic role in determining the direction of the economy – than most market theologians would have liked. What truly pushed the market into the culture – high and low – were the adjutants of Friedman’s revolution: the law professors and jurists, not just on the hard right (Richard Posner) but also on the squishy left (Stephen Breyer), who made economic efficiency the measure of all things and provided much of the rationale for deregulation; the second wave of free-market economists (Robert Lucas, for example, or Gary Becker), who took apart the field of macroeconomics in favour of game theory, behavioural economics, rational expectations and other individualist approaches; and journalists like George Gilder and Jude Wanniski who recast the market as a popular (and populist) vision of the good society.

In Praise of Interviews

Interviews can be a very useful window into the soul – depending on the skill of the interviewer and how experienced/defensive is the interviewee. Michael Parkinson was Britain's most famous television interviewer – he died last week. He was a rather “soft” interviewer, very much letting his guests perform - in complete contrast to the likes of Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, famous for her tough, no-holds-barred questioning of prominent figures such as Henry Kissinger and Komenei which you can read in her Interviews with History (1976)

Polly Toynbee is a progressive journalist and a stalwart of The Guardian newspaper which is seen as liberal but which revealed its true colours when it mounted a vicious campaign from 2016-2020 against Jeremy Corbyn. Faute de mieux, it is my regular daily reading but it thoroughly deserved the critical appraisal it got a couple of years ago with Capitalism’s Conscience – 200 years of the Guardian ed D Freedman (2021). Toynbee, typically, comes from an illustrious family – her grandfather was the famous historian Arnold Toynbee and she has just produced a revealing memoir “An Uneasy Inheritance – my family and other radicals”. 

She was the guest on James O'Brien's “Full Disclosure” podcast recently – one of my favourites by virtue of the excellence of his conversational style. Like Fallaci, he does his homework, choosing his subjects simply because he finds them interesting. And the interview is conducted in a relaxed way but with O'Brien picking up throwaway comments and using them skilfully. I didn't know, for example, about Toynbee's spells in low-paid work – very much like Barbara Ehrenreich who, very sadly, died just a year ago and is particularly famous for her “Nickel and Dimed” book. Toynbee – ever the Labour stalwart – produced, with David Walker in 2017, the book Dismembered – how the attack on the state threatens us all which inspired my Search for Democracy – a long journey (2023). And then The Lost Decade 2010-2020 - and what lies ahead for Britain which is as good an account of the state of Britain in 2020 as you are likely to find (although without a single bibliographical reference!)

And it's interesting to compare audio and visual impressions of character. Videos offer the advantage of seeing the body language - which was particularly noticeable in the interview O'Brien conducted with one of the contenders for Tory leadership Rory Stewart some years ago. Stewart now runs (with Alastair Campbell (Tony Blair's spin doctor) the UK's best-known podcast and is a bit of a maverick by virtue of his commitment to traditional Conservative values which are now very much dead in the water. Stewart was clearly at one of these points in his life where he was having to consider his future – evident in the thought he gave to the questions.

All of these people, of course, are “celebrities” – well used to being interviewed – which perhaps limits what we might reasonably expect them to give away. Less so, perhaps, Toynbee who, as a journalist, is more used to writing than speaking although her fluency told us a lot about her sense of privilege about which Stewart was ready to confess.

Chris Hitchens had a great essay on Oriana Fallaci and the art of the Interview

Biographies of Journals

• Capitalism’s Conscience – 200 years of the Guardian ed D Freedman (2021)

• Liberalism at Large – the world according to The Economist by Alexander Zevin (2019 reviewed in the New Yorke by the inimitable Pankaj Mishra

• Pessimism of the Intellect – history of the New Left Review; Duncan Thompson (2007)

AGAINST DESPAIR

The Western world has, in the new millennium, become despondent. In the 90s it was euphoric – but its world came crashing down with the Twin Towers in 2001, dealing a warning about the hubris it had shown. The falling standards of the working class then brought populism; the Global Financial Crisis austerity and rage against the indefensibly rich 1% and the governments in their pay. Global warming has been the last straw.

But what's new? My parents' generation had sleepless nights about economic depression and Fascism - my generation about the threat of nuclear war – although the 1960s brought new hope, starting with the initial issues of New Left Review (still going strong) and crystallised in the rebellious 1968

These thoughts were prompted by a post in Scottish Review which reflected on the author being accused of being too pessimistic in his writing – with links to posts in the same vein

The need for positive thinking has cropped up a couple of times in the blog – for example in a post about commanding hope and one about polarisation. And John Harris of the Guardian is one of the few journalists prepared to show examples of good community work - in his video series "Anwhere but Westminster"

But the real classics in the field (in descending order) are -

Hope in the dark Rebecca Solnit (2004) The classic contemporary statement of the need for a positive spirit – written at the time of the Iraq war. In 2016 Solnit reflected on the little book in this article

The End of Utopia – politics and culture in an age of apathy Russell Jacoby (1999) whose introduction contains this relevant injunction for our days - “At the dawn of another new century, Samuel Coleridge wrote to his friend William Wordsworth. Two hundred years ago, in 1799, he suggested that Wordsworth contest the widespread malaise and resignation. "I wish you would write a poem, in blank verse, addressed to those, who, in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution, have thrown up all hopes of the amelioration of mankind, and are sinking into an almost epicurean selfishness, disguising the same under the soft titles of domestic attachment and contempt for visionary philosophes."' I have not written a poem,but I would like to think that in its defence of visionary impulse this book partially fulfills Coleridge's bidding”.

Living in Truth – 22 essays Vaclev Havel 1989 As Havel made clear in earlier works, such as 1992’s Summer Meditations, he saw his new political role as fully consistent with his dissident opposition to totalitarianism. In his post-1989 books and speeches, Havel continued to defend a moral vision of politics that he called “nonpolitical politics” or “politics as morality in practice.” He identified this vision with the demanding but liberating task of “living in truth.” Havel refused to identify politics with a dehumanizing “technology of power,” the notion that power was an end in itself. Instead he defended a moral order that stands above law, politics, and economics—a moral order that “has a metaphysical anchoring in the infinite and eternal.” His speeches as president, many collected in English in The Art of the Impossible (1998), were artful exercises in moral and political philosophizing, enthralling Western audiences.

The Power of the powerless Havel (1978) His classic statement

The Principle of Hope; Ernst Bloch 1923 One of the earliest invitations to get off our butts!  

Why are there so few contemporary books about the impact of technology?

The last post demanded some thoughts about the wider aspects of technological change on our societies which, according to L Winner in his “The Whale and the Reactor –a search for limits in the age of high technology ” (1986) had not been much examined. It was a curious judgement for the author to make since the decades before had been full of texts from the likes of Jacques Ellul and Daniel Boorstin (see below) about precisely that topic. The computer and the idea of the information society had hit America in the 1960s – so it was hardly surprising that it became a hot topic. Even geo-strategist Brzezinski got into the act with the highly readable Between Two Ages – America's role in the technetronic era (1980)

And in 1985 NASA and the renowned James Burke and Isaac Asimov produced a useful little booklet The Impact of Science.

The long list of books given in the last post don't deal with the impact of technology per se – their interest is rather in specific issues viz the internet, social media, Artificial Intelligence or the effect on jobs. What is so interesting about the writings of Asimov, Boorstin, Brzezinski and Ellul is that interest was much wider – on the social impact of technology. 

There are very few of us who dare to challenge technological change. Most of us fear the ridicule involved – being the targets of taunts of being Canutes or Luddites. It, therefore, took a lot of courage for Jerry Mander in 1978 to produce Four Arguments for the elimination of television and for Neil Postman to follow this up with “Amusing Ourselves to Death” in 1985.

And, with his “In the absence of the sacred – the failure of technology” (1992) Jerry Mander went beyond television to critique our technological society as a whole.

In this provocative work, Mander challenges the utopian promise of technological society and tracks its devastating impact on cultures worldwide. The Western world’s loss of a sense of the sacred in the natural world, he says, has led us toward global environmental disaster and social disorder - and worse lies ahead. Yet models for restoring our relationship with the Earth exist in the cultures of native peoples, whose values and skills have enabled them to survive centuries of invasion and exploitation.

Far from creating paradise on Earth, technology has instead produced an unsustainable contest for resources. Mander surveys the major technologies shaping the “new world order”, computers, telecommunications, space exploration, genetic engineering, robotics, and the corporation itself and warns that they are merging into a global mega-technology, with dire environmental and political results.

Needless to say, none of such book were taken seriously. It took perhaps a BBC television series of technological dystopia Black Mirror which first hit screens in 2011 for us to begin to realise that technology has its perverse side.

Resource on Technology

The technological society jacques ellul 1964

Autonomous Technology – technics out of control? L Winner 1977

The technological system jacques ellul 1980

The technological bluff jacques ellul 1989

The impact of science james burke, isaac asimov (nasa 1985)

The republic of technology daniel boorstin 1978

Between two ages – america's role in the technetronic era zbigniew brzezinski 1980

The whale and the reactor –a search for limits in the age of high technology langdon winner 1986

Technopoly - the surrender of culture to technology' Neil Postman 1992

In the absence of the sacred – the failure of technology” Jerry Mander 1992

Neil Postman – 5 things we need to know about tech change 1999 And so, these are my five ideas about technological change. First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price. Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners. Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes that bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not. The printing press annihilated the oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life. And so on. Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates. And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us.

The second machine Age – work, progress and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies; Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014

Pax Technica – how the internet of things may set us free or lock us up Philip Howard 2015