Tech's Impact: Halting Evolution, World Destruction
Douglas Tompkins, founder of The North Face and Esprit, was famous for his environmental crusade. He spent hundreds of millions of dollars on land preservation in Argentina and Chile, together with his wife Kris, the former CEO of Patagonia.
He had frequent arguments with his friends, Steve Jobs, who tried to convince him that computers were going to save the world, while Tompkins argued digital technology was rather enslaving us.
This interview (published in The Guardian 10 years ago) struck me at the time and here are a few lines which I think are worth remembering:
1. [Computers and smartphones are] "deskilling devices; they make us dumber. We're immersed in a system that now requires the use of a cell phone just to get around, just to function and so the logic of that cell phone has been imposed on us.”
2. "Resource efficiency is the wrong metric […]. "We should use nature as the measure, using nature's wisdom as a template for our economic systems.”
➔ in other words, our addition to growth makes us focus on efficiency, disregarding sobriety as a model.
3. "As we get sucked more and more into the technosphere, we become less and less capable of understanding it because it becomes a technological milieu that we're in. […] It's similar to air; we're basically unconscious about the air. What we need is to understand what technologies themselves bring with them when they're introduced into culture.
4. Tompkins recalls the Apple advertising campaign that highlighted the 1,001 great things that the PC was going to give to us and would tell Jobs that these represented a mere 5% of what the computer did while the other 95% was all negative and exacerbating the biodiversity crisis.
5. "[Steve Jobs] was locked into a view that these technologies were going to bring all these good things. But that's typical of the purveyors of new technology. They're selling their product and their idea, and their prestige, their power and their influence. Their self-esteem is wrapped up in that. It's impossible for them to see it or to admit it, you see? Because, it pulls the rug out from underneath their purpose, especially when it's attached to a moral purpose.”