Potts, in the introduction to his paper, ‘Culture and Technology’, introduces the argument that after the 19th century and the advent of the phrase, ‘Industrial Revolution’, society has looked increasingly to technology to provide literalist metaphors for systems that might not have a direct correlation to what we understand colloquially as ‘technology’, eg: the brain as computer, or more recently, society as a ‘network’. Potts also says that the meaning and import of the word ‘technology’, has been contested by different groups who seek to control its meaning – the word ‘technocrat’ having positive and negative implications depending on the speaker.

Potts uses William Barret’s sentiment to describe the importance of ‘techniques’, skills, that are in themselves technologies and how the advent of their loss would mean our great pile of physical technology would be reduced to junk. This relates closely to themes explored by John Michael Greer, in his blog, ‘The Archdruid Report‘. Greer is an outspoken advocate for the preservation for certain sustainable, low-tech skills such as short-wave radio and has written at length about what he sees as the coming age of scarcity, brought about by dwindling resources and the inevitable collapse of the architecture that comprises the current Anglo-American way of life. Greer criticises both what he calls the ‘cornucopians’ (those who believe in the ever onwards and upwards trajectory of technological progress) and those obsessed with the apocalypse, always seeking to find what he would see as the realistic middle ground between the two – a low-tech, sustainable future based on greatly depleted resources. I believe Greer makes a convincing case for his arguments, citing numerous historical precedents for the rise and fall of communities. It was Greer who inspired me to read Spengler’s iconoclastic ‘Decline of the West’, a book dangerously ahead of its time, even if many of the ideas are now redundant.

Back to Potts. Potts makes a case that the literature written to describe technologies as metaphors for society should be as fluid and constantly changing as the technologies themselves. This is a point that resonates strongly with me, but the need for certainty and perhaps the investment of time and or money in certain ways of ‘doing’, could impede this worthy goal or perhaps simply that culture is now seen as “messy, confused and riven with contradictions”. If the like of Greer and Spengler prove correct, constantly updating the literature might be akin to rearranging the chairs on the Titanic.