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The Mounting Challenge of Progress
“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.” ― R. Buckminster Fuller
The mounting challenge that we now face is that we have lost sight of what progress really is. As we have accepted our roles as consumers and have shirked the responsibilities of citizens, we have given ourselves over to turning everything that we can into something else and calling it progress. Now that this movement of consumerism has culminated in making finance our biggest industry, we now find ourselves consumed with converting everything that we can — every natural resource, every calorie of human labor, every moment of time, and every relationship — into little blips of light and information that we call money.
Because this system we follow is based on the idea of scarcity, we are compelled to live our lives as if in a fervor to fill needs that were heretofore non-existent. In the name of progress, we find ourselves continually conspiring to invent new methods of creating addictions, compulsions, and obsessions to keep all of our fellow humans consuming as much as possible as well.
“We are different from our animal ancestors in that we are not content to merely survive,” Kevin Kelly reminds us in The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, “but have been incredibly busy making up new…
