Shrinking the Technosphere Quotes

“As we grow up in civilized society, we are measured, evaluated, educated and trained, licensed and credentialed, and are eventually classified and assigned our place. In the process, we become very attached to this artificial identity that has been thrust upon us and very reluctant to set foot outside of it. (When we do, it is often when we are on vacation. It may therefore be helpful to think of this transition as going on a permanent vacation.) But if we overcome one fear—the fear of losing our assigned place in society—then many other fears fall away. Rational fears—ones that are based on an accurate perception of danger—do and should remain, but the irrational fear of stepping outside yourself and becoming someone else tends to disappear. And this opens us up to making dramatic changes, adapting to new circumstances and environments and, in the process, setting ourselves free.”
― Dmitry Orlov, Shrinking the Technosphere: Getting a Grip on Technologies that Limit our Autonomy, Self-Sufficiency and Freedom

“This saying also implies that if you realize that you are incompetent but do not wish to remain so, you should perhaps go out and have some adventures. If you survive, not only will you gain some measure of competence (lessons learned in extreme circumstances are not soon forgotten) but you will also acquire certain other qualities—self-confidence, fearlessness, a certain inner calm—that will make it easier to face any other adversity in spite of your incompetence. Taking this a step further, you can think of surviving adventures in spite of incompetence as a special skill. Given what our future holds, we are all going to be rendered incompetent at some point. Yes, we are all amateurs when it comes to surviving the future. Of course, there are still many things that are worth learning to increase your level of competence, but perhaps you should also work on becoming better at compensating for your incompetence—by having some adventures.”
― Dmitry Orlov, Shrinking the Technosphere: Getting a Grip on Technologies that Limit our Autonomy, Self-Sufficiency and Freedom

“The point is, you must show them how to live and not just teach them theory while contradicting yourself in practice, because cynicism, hypocrisy and insincerity are adult character traits that children have no way of appreciating. Children learn by imitating our behavior, and if it contradicts our thinking then at best they learn to simply ignore what we say and at worst become troubled by it. Suppose you teach them about the environmental devastation they will witness during their lives, and explain to them that it is being caused by burning fossil fuels, and that during their lives fossil fuels will disappear altogether with nothing to replace them … while continuing to burn hundreds of gallons of heating oil to heat an oversized house, driving all over creation in an oversized vehicle, jetting off to the tropics on brief winter holidays and going on shopping sprees to buy on a whim things you don’t need. Then what you would be teaching them is that you can’t be trusted. And this doesn’t help them; instead, it damages their spirit. It is better to have an ignorant fool for a parent than a well-informed hypocrite because being a fool is not a moral failing. Fools deserve pity and mercy; hypocrites—neither.”
― Dmitry Orlov, Shrinking the Technosphere: Getting a Grip on Technologies that Limit our Autonomy, Self-Sufficiency and Freedom

“THE TECHNOSPHERE DOESN’T particularly care whether you live or die, or whether you are happy or miserable. Its goal is to control you and to make you serve its purposes, which are to grow, to control everything and to dominate the biosphere. How it achieves this control is a matter of what is most efficient. If you are one of its faithful servants, then the best way to make you do your job well is to incentivize you—to give you high status, ample pay and lots of perks. But if you are a lowly menial grunt in its service who, unfortunately, cannot yet be replaced by a shiny new robot, then low pay and low status suffice, and destroying your autonomy and self-reliance while fostering your dependency is the key to making you perform. If you are a technologically useless person but harmless—an artist, a philosopher, writer, poet, free thinker—then the technosphere simply can’t see you, because what you do is not measurable in units the technosphere can understand. But if your thinking turns out to be dangerous or harmful to the techno-sphere—because you are someone who tries to break the chains of dependency and to find ways to live outside of the technosphere, or to undermine it in some other way—then it will consider you as nothing less than a terrorist!”
― Dmitry Orlov, Shrinking the Technosphere: Getting a Grip on Technologies that Limit our Autonomy, Self-Sufficiency and Freedom

“Politics, democratic and otherwise, is a smokescreen behind which lurk political machines that are designed to make sure the choices you make are functionally identical to the choices that are made for you without your knowledge.”
― Dmitry Orlov, Shrinking the Technosphere: Getting a Grip on Technologies that Limit our Autonomy, Self-sufficiency and Freedom

“THERE IS A saying I happen to like: Adventure is a sign of incompetence. I find that there is a lot of truth to it; after all, consummate professionals don’t go out looking for adventure and rarely find any. After a certain level of competence is reached, you are simply playing it safe all the time while executing your plans, and adventure becomes routine. After all, why would you take unnecessary risks if you know better? That is why the adventures of incompetent people make interesting stories, while the adventures of competent people do not—because they aren’t really adventures at all but random mishaps.”
― Dmitry Orlov, Shrinking the Technosphere: Getting a Grip on Technologies that Limit our Autonomy, Self-Sufficiency and Freedom

“Last, but by no means least, the advance of technology has produced a human population that is far more helpless and dependent than any human population before, one that is unable to survive when exposed to the elements, or travel long distances on foot, make its own tools, construct its own shelter, clothe and feed itself without outside assistance, treat diseases with substances available from the environment, or teach its children to survive on their own … How will these people, who have been conditioned since birth to expect to be taken care of by a vast industrial machine, respond to suddenly being forced to rely on their own wits and physical strength to survive? How many of them will not even try and simply await a rescue that will never come?”
― Dmitry Orlov, Shrinking the Technosphere: Getting a Grip on Technologies that Limit our Autonomy, Self-Sufficiency and Freedom

“To do so, we first have to learn to see it for what it is—by cutting through all of the buzzwords, the marketing hype, the pseudoscientific shibboleths and mumbo-jumbo. Then we have to learn to evaluate it: if it is efficient, then by what measure, and who stands to benefit from its efficiency? Efficiency as a euphemism for corporate profitability shouldn’t fool us. Efficiency is a measure that relates productivity (output) to labor and resource inputs; it is meaningless unless we understand all the implications of these inputs and outputs. For a solar panel, does it simply input solar radiation and output electric current? No, its input is all the energy—mainly from fossil fuels—that went into mining, refining, fabricating, finance, design, research, sales, shipping, installation, tech support, maintenance and disposal. Its output is, yes, a modest amount of electricity. It could well turn out that your solar panel is a way to convert a lot of fossil fuel energy into a bit of electricity with the help of sunlight. How efficient is that? Perhaps it would be more efficient to use less electricity—or to not use electricity at all.”
― Dmitry Orlov, Shrinking the Technosphere: Getting a Grip on Technologies that Limit our Autonomy, Self-Sufficiency and Freedom