« Technology destroys people and places. I’m rejecting it. »

We are publishing a series of articles written by the Irish luddite and autonomist author Mark Boyle, which were published in the British newspaper The Guardian between 2016 and 2019. In this first text, Boyle explains why he decided to abandon “complex” technology, meaning the authoritarian techniques dependent on the techno-industrial system. He is also the author of The Way Home: Tales from a Life Without Technology (2019).

However, it is important to note that Boyle’s approach, to be expanded to more people and sustained over time, must be part of a global resistance movement against technology with the sole objective of shutting down the system. Otherwise, all existing alternatives to industrial society will likely be swept away in the coming decades.

You can read the other texts by Mark Boyle here:

1. Technology destroys people and places. I’m rejecting it

2. Lessons of living like a prince outside cyberia

3. Bored? No way. Ditching technology makes life complicated and beautiful

4. Environmentalism used to be about defending the wild – not any more

5. Living without technology taught me about life in society;

6. You don’t need modern medicine to be healthy;

7. Living without technology is not romantic;

8. We must resist, revolt, and rewild ourselves;

9. Disconnecting from the industrial world helped me discover what reality really is.

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From Wednesday, I’m going to live without my laptop, internet, phone, washing machine or television. I want my life back. I want my soul back. From Wednesday, I’m rejecting the world of complex technology entirely. That means no laptop, no internet, no phone, no washing machine, no tapped water, no gas, no fridge, no television or electronic music; no anything requiring the copper-mining, oil-rigging, plastics-manufacturing essential to the production of a single toaster or solar photovoltaic system.

I decided to eschew complex technology for two reasons. The first was that I found myself happier away from screens and the relentless communication they generate, and instead living intimately with my locale. The second, more important, was the realisation that technology destroys, in more ways than one.

It destroys our relationship with the natural world. It first separates us from nature, while simultaneously converting life into the cash that oils consumerist society. Not only does it enable us to destroy habitat efficiently, over time this separation has led us to valuing the natural world less, meaning we protect and care for it less. By way of this vicious technological cycle, we are consciously causing the sixth mass extinction of species.

Technology destroys places. Aside from the oceans, rivers, topsoil, forests, mountains and meadows, it helps us massacre and pollute with ever-improving precision and speed, its complex set of cogs quickly spreads us out all over the world, safe in the knowledge that we can stay in touch with loved ones via technologies that offer what is really only a toxic substitute for real connection and time together. It is badly injuring, perhaps fatally, rural communities, luring their youth into industrial and financial centres – cities – whose existence is premised, as the American writer and environmentalist Wendell Berry said, on the devastation of some other far-flung place, which consumers don’t have to look at thanks to the out-of-sight, out-of-mind distance afforded by technology.

Technology destroys people. We’re already cyborgs (pacemakers, hearing aids) of a sort, and are well on our way to the type of Big Brother dystopia of the techno-utopians. And look at the state of us. Our toxic, sedentary lifestyles are causing industrial-scale afflictions of cancer, mental illness, obesity, heart disease, auto-immune disorders and food intolerances, along with those slow killers, loneliness, clock-watching and meaninglessness. We seem to spend more time watching porn than we do making love, relationships are breaking down because we stare into screens instead of eyes, while social media are making us antisocial.

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To read the full version :

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/19/life-without-technology-rejecting-technology

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