[lbo-talk] RE: Technology not neutral

[Shane Mage]

Dwayne Monroe wrote:
>
>...nuclear was pushed onto the scene, sold, marketed and
>supported by government subsidy for the benefit of
>energy firms...Our entire perception of these technologies was
>developed in a deeply flawed environment; we can't see
>them as they might be imagined, supported, developed
>and deployed in a less flawed world.
>
>So we think that solar, wind and other alternatives
>are morally superior because they've been the outcasts
>of the dominant system....

Nuclear energy, like any technology, is in itself "morally"
neutral.  What is immoral is to impose a grossly uneconomic
technology (worse because it was imposed at least in part
for military reasons).  Nor are renewable energy technologies,
in and of themselves, "morally superior."  Their superiority was
always economic in the true (broadest) sense:  their long-run
cost to the human ecology is much less.  What is immoral
is the capitalist politico-economic system, which leaves
valuable technologies to languish while wasting huge
economic and natural resources for the short-run benefit
of dominant vested interests and military parasites.

Shane Mage

"When we read on a printed page the doctrine of Pythagoras that all 
things are made of numbers, it seems mystical, mystifying, even 
downright silly.

When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of Pythagoras that all 
things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently true."  (N. 
Weiner)