A Rant About 'Technology'

• “more interested in how minds, societies, and cultures work”
• “how can anybody make a story about a future or an alien culture without describing, implicitly or explicitly, its technology?”
• “Its technology is how a society copes with physical reality”
• “Technology is the active human interface with the material world.”
• “the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources.”
• “We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology” at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers — as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe”
• “One way to illustrate that most technologies are, in fact, pretty “hi,” is to ask yourself of any manmade object, Do I know how to make one?”
• “Anybody who ever lighted a fire without matches has probably gained some proper respect for “low” or “primitive” or “simple” technologies; anybody who ever lighted a fire with matches should have the wits to respect that notable hi-tech invention.”
• “I don’t know how to build and power a refrigerator, […] I could learn. We all can learn. That’s the neat thing about technologies. They’re what we can learn to do.”
• “All science fiction is, in one way or another, technological. Even when it’s written by people who don’t know what the word means.”