Living without technology is not romantic

Discover the seventh text in the series by Mark Boyle, author of The Way Home: Tales from a Life Without Technology (2019), where he recounts his experience of living without industrial technology. In this piece, Boyle addresses the common criticism (often wrongly) directed at anti-tech individuals, accusing them of romanticizing life close to nature and the earth. He also explains that, when considered individually without factoring in the broader social and environmental costs of the techno-industrial system, modern technologies undoubtedly have some advantages. These reflections echo some of Theodore Kaczynski’s critiques of anarcho-primitivism[1].

You can read the other texts by Mark Boyle here:

1. Technology destroys people and places. I’m rejecting it

2. Lessons of living like a prince outside cyberia

3. Bored? No way. Ditching technology makes life complicated and beautiful

4. Environmentalism used to be about defending the wild – not any more

5. Living without technology taught me about life in society;

6. You don’t need modern medicine to be healthy;

7. Living without technology is not romantic;

8. We must resist, revolt, and rewild ourselves;

9. Disconnecting from the industrial world helped me discover what reality really is.

__________

What do I miss about technology most? Match of the Day and my parents’ voices

These are strange times. I remember once, a few months before I rejected industrial-scale technology, searching online for an image of an old, disregarded variety of apple. Hoping to make a positive identification, I instead encountered a screen dominated by the trademark logo of the Apple corporation. Taken aback, I typed in blackberry and orange to see what would happen. I was offered mobile phone deals. I hadn’t heard of Tinder at the time, but I suspect the indications of wood shavings, birch bark and bracken wouldn’t monopolise your page.

Six months later I read Robert Mcfarlane’s Landmarks, his remarkable, place-particularising contribution to a “glossary of enchantment for the whole Earth”. In it he revealed that words such as acorn, ash, bluebell, conker, dandelion, kingfisher, otter and pasture have been replaced, in the 2007 Oxford Junior Dictionary, by words like block graph, blog, bullet point, celebrity, chat room and cut-and-paste. The Oxford university press explanation – that these are the things that now comprise a child’s life – was pragmatic, understandable, honest and deeply worrying.

The Facebook (or is it now Snapchat?) generation will hardly miss conkers, having never played with them. It’s odd – when I was growing up on the working-class council estate on the edgelands of a struggling town, no one ever thought to ask me if I missed anything about the natural world which my culture was doing its very best to reject. At the moment I choose bluebells over bullet points, and it seems everyone wants to know what I miss most about machines.

Read the full version:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/27/living-without-technology-convenience-unintended-consequences