I feel like you might’ve made a good character in “A Canticle for Liebowitz”.

I’m not against technology per se: shovels are fine, steam engines are fascinating but they are at the turning point where the machine begins to become too complicated for its own good.

My objections are based on my experiences with living in this society, and I do not find it a pleasant experience, apparently contrary to most people, who seem to enjoy all this technological overcomplexity. There is a point where this just gets ridiculous: I do not want my laptop to do my thinking for me and correct all my spellings for words that it thinks I don’t want (imagine Joyce writing Finnegans Wake on a laptop!). I do not want my car to drive for me on cruise control or navigate me to my destination. I can make all those decisions for myself, thank you. I do not want to be issued tickets in the mail from an obscure and impersonal camera eye with absolutely infallible judgement to take the law into its own hands. I don’t need a cell phone, I don’t like text messaging, and the only reason I am writing on this computer and using the Internet right now to communicate these thoughts is simply because that is the way my society has set these things up for communication these days. In order for me to go against them and revert to letter writing, say, or trying to publish old-fashioned literary essays on these topics, would be to exile myself from being heard at all. By anyone. So, with great reluctance, I use the machine, but only because society is in a conspiracy against the individual to force him to do these things if his voice wants to be heard at all. I don’t do this because I like it.

No, I side with Lao-Tzu, who said:

“Ah, for a small country with a small population! Though there are highly efficient mechanical contrivances, the people have no use for them. Let them mind death and refrain from migrating to distant places. Boats and carriages, weapons and armour there may still be, but there are no occasions for using or displaying them. Let the people revert to communication by knotting cords. See to it that they are contented with their food, pleased with their clothing, satisfied with their houses, and inured to their simple ways of living.”

I’m in full agreement with Lao-tzu, and I look forward to the day when all this technology is over and done with.

So while the nightmare of EM Forester’s “Machine” or the monolithic and de-humanizing technics of Lewis Mumford represent the apogee of our alienation from our humanness, I also am fascinated by how the psyche has responded to the “freedoms” that the machine has enabled. The expression of the Ego has never been more central to a culture or civilization, but at the same time there have never been more opportunities for the Ego to be frustrated. I think one would be surprised at how quickly we would normalize and adapt to a post-technical world…which maybe is your point.

What seems clearly lamentable is the scale and acceleration characteristic of our industrial civilization. More than anything, these mechanical appendages seem to enable the latent junkie psychology that our limbic system is hardwired to express. Bigger, faster, more, more. Jevon’s paradox, which economists have been aware of for at least 200 years, states that more efficient technologies will not curb consumption, on the contrary they will only enable further consumption. This is why fuel efficient vehicles rather than cause less consumption would only enable people to drive more. Clearly the collective ability for civilizations to cognate their dilemma is about as sophisticated as the ability a yeast culture has to realize that its consumption of oxygen will lead to a abiotic dieoff-which is to say non-existent.

Mr. Ebert, I would not fear the machine so much, it’s days are clearly numbered. World oil production peaked in July 2008, and the long slow descent into a de-industrial future has already begun. At the moment this transition is being expressed most concretely as economic turmoil, but soon it will morph into more tangible forms of unrest and deprivation. I would recommend for you to take a look at Peak Oil and the work of the editors of The Oil Drum.

I’m reminded of Thomas Cole’s famous sequence “The Course of Empire” and it’s inspiration, Count Constantin de Volney’s, (The Ruins, A Mediation on the Revolutions of Empires) (1791). Although in many ways Cole’s series was more intentionally a philosophical treatise about the dangers of a badly run state, it also serves to illustrate that civilization, far from being inviolate and eternal, is nothing more than a human creation and therefore not immune to the vagaries of time and decay (Spengler, Vico) Ironic that the inexhaustible resources of the American interior have now begun to deplete and that the very ruins that Cole believed to be exclusive to the irrational corruption of European civilization have now begun to concretize all across the American wasteland.

The machine will soon run out of juice.