Technology aims to destroy and replace the three traditional foundational forms of human life: nature, culture and religion. A radical and original shift from that ongoing trend would be to allow technology to enter a symbiotic relation with nature, culture and religion. That is one of the ambitions of the series of articles on this website.
It was common in the old days to view nature as something external to man. The Enlightenment project was the realization of human ambition to rule nature, to make nature something of culture, and it managed to do so as well.
The post enlightenment movements treated nature as dominated, with one of its peak expression taking form in modernism, in which the duality of culture (man) / nature dominated.
The creation of technology and tools in general (language being one of them), have to do with control, they allow control of the environment, they allow people to collaborate and transform, to make everything non-human more human.
We notice with the rise of human nature-domination that other forces beyond human control started being visible, started dominating man.
Some of these forces are the tools we make ourselves : logic, tech, language, history or : the power of narrative and words, ideologic – these rules us, dictate our lives, have form of their own, have certain movements, beyond the control of one person or a group of people.
While our epoch is considered the anthropocene do we dominate our ideas or our idea dominate us ? To say we have significantly altered the atmosphere, climate, oceans, ecosystems, and geology through things like industrialisation, large-scale agriculture, resource extraction, and pollution.
It is this why the machine is the omega Ω, technology compresses time, by doing it it brings the end of things closer. Nature, the living systems on earth are on a state of equilibrium, they sustain each other and therefore have the possibility to last for a very long time. Technology accelerate, uses resources, depletes, disrupts, not only the physical world, but value by itself, our semantic fields. It is therefore why technology stands in opposition to ecology.
Ω