I understand that there are a lot of people who hate industrialisation, and who are probably starting to hate mechanical/electronic technology in
general, due to what it has done to this planet. I am writing this primarily in response to the recent
factory farm thread I've seen here, but am also talking in more general terms. That
is why I decided to start a new thread, because I wanted a discussion about industrialisation and its' effects on the planet, in all of its' forms;
not just factory farms.
I've been using the UNIX computer operating system on and off for the last 15 years now. I've read Eric Raymond's book,
The Art of UNIX
Programming, more times than I can count, since he first wrote it in 2003. I'm also going to be doing a Permaculture design course at the
Permaculture Research Institute in New South Wales in less than a month.
I want to assure everyone here of something. What you have seen, and what I join you in my own hatred of, is
bad engineering.
I am not primarily an environmentalist. I am not an animal liberationist, although saying that, I have no tolerance for cruelty to animals, either;
and spent six years unsuccessfully attempting to become vegetarian, before discovering that I was not metabolically capable of it. My real passion,
however, is systems theory, and good engineering. So I can promise anyone here that it boils my own blood just as much as yours when I see
attrocities like factory farming.
It maddens me because I want a world that is based on
good, well designed, robust, modular, redundant technology that both emulates
natural principles, and works
with what's left of the planet's ecosystem, rather than destroying it.
It maddens me because I love the Internet, and contemporary technology when it is well designed, and the name of mechanisation itself has been dragged
through the mud probably beyond repair in much of the collective human mind. This is bad, because eventually we are going to be pushed so close to
extinction, that eventually a crowd will rise up with proverbial torch and pitchfork, and smash any and all machines. That which I have loved for
most of my life, and which I feel born to work with, and which could have been an enormous blessing to humanity, will be destroyed in the process,
because people will not have understood that mechanical technology itself is not inherently evil, nor is it to blame, here.
These industrial farms, and other attrocities like them, are designed by lazy, unintelligent, greedy, profit-minded, apathetic people. They are as
much an attrocity and an insult to engineering as they are to animal welfare and Nature. As someone in the above linked thread mentioned, it would
not be difficult at all to redesign that system, in order to create a scenario that is humane to animals, and does not thus generate products that are
harmful to humans as well.
This is why I want to do the permaculture design course. I am going to do that, get certified to work with BSD UNIX, and eventually also get some
type of qualification in either electronics or electrical engineering. Once I have done that, I will have all of the formal training I need, to begin
to create systems which integrate both the environment and mechanical/electronic technology in beneficial, peaceful, elegant, robust, and non-harmful
ways; ways which we are actually going to really need, if we are going to save what is left of the environment of this planet.
So in closing, if you want to hate any element of science for this, I invite you to direct all of your bile at Renee Descartes, and his philosophy
that was completely anti-animistic, and advocated treating both humans and animals as mere robots, rather than beings possessed of spirits. My own
love of technology does not mean that I am a materialistic atheist; quite the opposite.
It means that I recognise the urgency in our beginning to view automisation and mechanisation as tools; sometimes genuinely wonderful tools, yes, but
never more than tools, in the hands of beings that must learn to recognise the eternal spirits that exist both within themselves, and all other forms
of life with which we share this planet.