Very well written. I'd like to think we're not as close to the brink of disaster as he makes it sound! And, perhaps it's a bit self serving for the poet/environmentalist/nostalgist to argue that humans are not rational or logical. It would seem that the author is fighting for a definition of "human" which does not include the flexibility to learn & change.
I don't think he's arguing that we don't learn and change; I think he's arguing that we learn and change to benefit our technologies because we've become entrapped by them:It would seem that the author is fighting for a definition of "human" which does not include the flexibility to learn & change.
Advanced technologies ... created dependency; they took tools and processes out of the hands of individuals and put them into the metaphorical hands of organizations. The result was often “modernized poverty,” in which human individuals became the equivalent of parts in a machine rather than the owners and users of a tool.
I find that point to be the opposite of what I would naively think. Couldn't the argument easily be made that technology has freed human minds to ponder deeper, more meaningful issues? That we've simply abstracted the processes which we're very good at in order to think about the things we're not so good at? Admittedly, this article has given me a lot of pause. The scope is quite broad - there are a lot of things to consider here...