When we think of technology, we generally think of machines and gadgets
that populate our life. For those in industry, the word may mean a process
with many steps for the manufacture of a product—products that include
things as complex as a computer and as simple as a potato chip.
For the ancient Greeks the word techne—from which we get
technology—referred to what they called the mechanical arts—which in our
day would be all of industry and commerce geared toward the practical ends
of survival and for the support of other pursuits such as sports and
entertainment.
While we watch our technically advanced global society founder as its
denizens are once again brought low by another wave of COVID-19, we find
ourselves stuck in a loop that tells us we simply need more technology. In
this case, we say we need continuous vaccine booster shots. And, of course, we need everyone
who hasn't already done so to receive a vaccine of some sort. While there is considerable evidence that vaccines lessen the severity of an
infection and therefore reduce the likelihood of hospitalization and
death, they neither prevent COVID nor prevent its transmission.
What we cannot fathom is that technology is just as often the source of
problems as solutions, and that more technology often creates more
problems. The technology that allows anyone with the money to fly across
the ocean in less than a day is a pandemic-promoting technology. The
technologies that enable transoceanic and transcontinental shipping are
pandemic-promoting technologies. Even long-distance car rides allow us to
spread infectious diseases to a frightening extent.
And, it is our far-flung supply chain which makes us dependent on
such transportation networks.
Instead of thinking about how we can lessen the obvious paths of
cross-border and cross country transmission, we keep doubling down on
pharmaceutical technology, thinking it alone will somehow solve the
pandemic problem.
Especially egregious is a new drug used to treat COVID patients that
works by causing multiple mutations in the virus in an attempt to shut
down its replication. Some
virologists believe this drug could unleash many new and deadlier
strains of COVID. That fear is not a hypothetical concern as each
new variant poses novel challenges. If this new drug doesn't risk obvious
and severe dangers of a negative return for society, then nothing does.
Add to this the contribution of our industrial diet laced with
pesticides, herbicides and industrial chemical contaminants that spawns
chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and many inflammatory
ailments which make people less robust in the face of infection. Include the toxic chemicals we absorb from the air and water that do the
same, and we end up with a dangerous trifecta of complexity that creates a
potent combination of negative returns for our entire global society.
The question we should be asking ourselves is whether we have passed the
point when more technology will always provide net gains in stability for our
society. Historian Joseph Tainter's seminal treatise on societal collapse
entitled The
Collapse of Complex Societies suggests a rough way to judge.
Tainter explains that societies increase complexity as a way to solve
problems. The simplest illustration is the training and deployment of
specialists, for example, engineers who know how to build irrigation
canals. As complexity demonstrates its huge benefits, more specialization
and complexity is added and more benefits accrue.
At some point, the complexity no longer adds benefits and even begins to
subtract from the stability and wealth of a society. But we humans are so
convinced by our past experience that more complexity will solve any
problem that we ignore the signs of declining and even negative returns.
I believe that we have now reached the point in our contemporary
civilization when complexity has turned against us. The devastating and
swift spread of the COVID-19 virus was a product of our efficient,
affordable, and complex globe-spanning logistics and transportation system. That
system continues to generate a substantial negative return on our
complexity when it comes to the spread of COVID. It facilitates the spread
of each new dominant variant of COVID across the globe in a matter of
weeks. In truth, the vulnerability, the negative return, was already
embedded in that system. We just didn't realize it until now.
And yet even now, practically every leader on Earth is telling us that he
or she is plotting a course back to "normal," that is, to the way things
were before the pandemic. No leader of note is telling his or her people
that the future will be considerably different from the past. It seems
that the public will simply have to figure it out for itself.
The chaos we are experiencing is the product of negative returns on
complexity. Many of those who rely on that complexity for maintaining their
wealth are desperately trying to prevent a simplification of the systems
we live under.
They can try and possibly succeed for a time. But as the necessity of
simplification grows, we can either plan for it or plunge headlong into
even deeper chaos. So far we are choosing the chaos option.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider, and many other places. He
is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He is currently a fellow of the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.
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