Nature, Machines, and Waste

In his book, Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse has this to say on the topic of the damage we do to the environment, the machines and technologies we build to make our lives comfortable, and the waste we product:

“Our domination of nature is meant to achieve not certain natural outcomes, but certain societal outcomes.”

Once you keep that aim (comfort, a certain way of life) in mind, it becomes obvious why it is so hard for mankind to change its approach, regardless of the damage we do to the environment. “Abandoning the strategy of power in our attitude towards nature” will have “cultural consequences”.

 

Nothing new in any of that, of course. Then he adds:

“Nature has no outside, it has no inside”.

We are part of it too. And nature is not against us. Rather:

“It is the display of a perfect indifference on nature’s part to all matters cultural.”

We think of earthquakes, volcanoes and landslides as random. But:

“Nature is neither chaotic nor ordered. Chaos and order describe the cultural experience of nature – the degree to which nature’s indifferent spontaneity seems to agree with our current manner of cultural self-control.”

The paradox, he then adds, is that the more a society accepts the “indifference of nature”, the more “creatively it will call upon its own spontaneity in response”, i.e., we build machines and come up with new technologies.

 

And then those very machines and technologies begins to influence us!

“While a machine greatly aids the operator… it also disciplines its operator… All machines… require operators to… perform functions mechanically adapted to the functions of the machine. To use the machine is to be controlled by the machine.”

Take a phone, for example. It is meant to communicate, but it only works if both of us have a phone. And so:

“To the degree that my association with you depends on such machinery, the connecting medium makes each of us an extension of itself.”

Some machines change the very nature of the problem they were created to solve. Like modern warfare machinery: we kill without even seeing the enemy, from as far away as possible:

“This reaches an extreme form in the belief that our enemies are not unseen because they are enemies, but are enemies because they are unseen.”

Other machines take us away from the here and now:

“Radios and films allow us to be where we are not and not be where we are.”

I wonder what he’d have to say about virtual reality…

 

And then he moves to the topic of the waste we generate:

“Waste is unveiling. As we find ourselves standing in garbage that we know is our own, we find also that it is garbage we have chosen to make, and having chosen to make it could choose not to make it.”

But of course, it isn’t that easy to “choose not to make”: it has those cultural consequences on our lifestyles. And so:

“Because waste is unveiling, we remove it.”

To landfills. Dumped it in the ocean. Or buried. Anywhere where it can’t be seen. Out of sight, out of mind:

“(Waste) is a kind of anti-property… We compete to dispossess them. We force it on others less able to get rid themselves of it. Trash accumulates in slums, sewage runs downstream… Waste is the anti-property that becomes the possession of the losers.”