WHY SMART PHONES WILL BE DUMB

In a recent discussion with John Michael Greer, Peak Prosperity blogger Chris Martenson talks of the ‘iphone moment’, the point in his talks where people pull out their little piece of technology and wave them in his face as proof that mankind is on the up-and-up.

Greer minces no words making mincemeat of the claim. He points out that smartphones produce no energy and solve none of our ecological problems, yet they take energy and resources to produce. In short, they are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Elsewhere on his blog, Martenson discusses something I come across regularly: the ‘thousand-mile stare’. People start to listen to you, but then discomfort makes them disengage. Here’s his argument:

“Do iphones produce energy? Nope. Will they refill our rapidly depleting oil and gas wells, restock the ravaged oceans with fish, or restore the vanishing topsoil from the world’s fields? Of course not. Will they suck carbon dioxide from the sky, get rid of the vast mats of floating plastic that clog the seas, or do something about the steadily increasing stockpiles of nuclear waste that are going to sicken and kill people for the next quarter of a million years unless the waste gets put someplace safe, if there is anywhere safe to put it at all? Not a chance.

“As a response to any of the predicaments that are driving the crisis of our age, iphones are at best irrelevant. Since they consume energy and resources, and the sprawling technosystems that make them function consume energy and resources at a rate orders of magnitude greater, they’re part of the problem, not any sort of a solution.” Source: www.resilience.org/ stories/2015-04-09/theburden-of-denial