Book Review: What
Technology Wants
Technology Wants
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Book Review – What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly
This is an engrossing book. It is about what Kelly calls the
technium. Things are not the way they have always been.
It is all different. This is Kelly’s technium it has grown
huge, out of all proportion man made tools, machines.
What is all this stuff really? It’s everywhere. Are
machines and living things the same? Do they spring from
the same unseen pattern underlying everything? Kelly’s
book bogs down when he goes on and on with examples.
He is very widely read but in a way who cares? Why write
such a long book? If all this is happening anyway what
difference does Kelly’s insight make? How are we doing?
Isn’t that what counts? Technium, schnecknium. It isn’t all
inevitable; I’m watching technology in the solar business
center on electricity. Technology goes forward but what
about the public? Here in NM our technium is omitting
glass. Our new shopping centers have few windows or
skylights. The electric lights are on all through every
sunny day. At the same time we are building huge
subsidized solar power plants and many subsidized wind
farms. It would be more simple if we used plain old
windows and skylights plus all the great passive heating
and cooling we investigated thirty and forty years ago. I
like Kelly’s optimism and there is something very
appealing in his style. He mentions his wife, three children
and 2 nieces and a sister in law. They all live in his large
house. That is why his book appeals, he is buoyed by life
and all the kids. I’ll wait for his empty nest volume on
technology to get another side. Long ago man lived by fire
in caves he found. Then we moved out of the caves
invented the wheel, made glass, even built cathedrals now
we are returning to caves, (those concrete shopping
centers) where we live by wire, luminous television
screens, endless ceilings of fluorescent lights and push
button air conditioning. I don’t think this is inevitable.
Some are getting rich. You have to be under a spell to not
see that we could save a lot by returning to skylights.
Maybe Kelly’s technium is involved. We do live under a
spell- how else could I not have noticed about 9-11? It
took years of working with and listening to our tool maker
to realize that the world trade towers were blown up with
explosives, that an airline never hit the pentagon.
Kelly needs, along with his wonderful chapter on the
Unabomber, a chapter on 9-11.
We are letting everything including technology go beserk.
It won’t magically correct itself, that’s for us to do and we
can correct it.
Israel and its many collaborators did 9-11. Read Albert
Pastore’s Stranger Than Fiction, print it off the internet.
Read David Ray Griffin’s many books on the
contradictions in the stories we have been told.
Look at Chris Bollyn’s website.
We have two wars, a ruined economy. We need to put a
stop to this. Who wants to be enslaved?
Let’s investigate, straighten it out then enjoy the wonders of
Kelly’s technium.
This is an engrossing book. It is about what Kelly calls the
technium. Things are not the way they have always been.
It is all different. This is Kelly’s technium it has grown
huge, out of all proportion man made tools, machines.
What is all this stuff really? It’s everywhere. Are
machines and living things the same? Do they spring from
the same unseen pattern underlying everything? Kelly’s
book bogs down when he goes on and on with examples.
He is very widely read but in a way who cares? Why write
such a long book? If all this is happening anyway what
difference does Kelly’s insight make? How are we doing?
Isn’t that what counts? Technium, schnecknium. It isn’t all
inevitable; I’m watching technology in the solar business
center on electricity. Technology goes forward but what
about the public? Here in NM our technium is omitting
glass. Our new shopping centers have few windows or
skylights. The electric lights are on all through every
sunny day. At the same time we are building huge
subsidized solar power plants and many subsidized wind
farms. It would be more simple if we used plain old
windows and skylights plus all the great passive heating
and cooling we investigated thirty and forty years ago. I
like Kelly’s optimism and there is something very
appealing in his style. He mentions his wife, three children
and 2 nieces and a sister in law. They all live in his large
house. That is why his book appeals, he is buoyed by life
and all the kids. I’ll wait for his empty nest volume on
technology to get another side. Long ago man lived by fire
in caves he found. Then we moved out of the caves
invented the wheel, made glass, even built cathedrals now
we are returning to caves, (those concrete shopping
centers) where we live by wire, luminous television
screens, endless ceilings of fluorescent lights and push
button air conditioning. I don’t think this is inevitable.
Some are getting rich. You have to be under a spell to not
see that we could save a lot by returning to skylights.
Maybe Kelly’s technium is involved. We do live under a
spell- how else could I not have noticed about 9-11? It
took years of working with and listening to our tool maker
to realize that the world trade towers were blown up with
explosives, that an airline never hit the pentagon.
Kelly needs, along with his wonderful chapter on the
Unabomber, a chapter on 9-11.
We are letting everything including technology go beserk.
It won’t magically correct itself, that’s for us to do and we
can correct it.
Israel and its many collaborators did 9-11. Read Albert
Pastore’s Stranger Than Fiction, print it off the internet.
Read David Ray Griffin’s many books on the
contradictions in the stories we have been told.
Look at Chris Bollyn’s website.
We have two wars, a ruined economy. We need to put a
stop to this. Who wants to be enslaved?
Let’s investigate, straighten it out then enjoy the wonders of
Kelly’s technium.