THE COMMANDING HEIGHTS
made with advanced fabrics or materials that give it much greater payload capacity. Airships are ecologically sound and could be used for slow but cheap and safe transport in regions where there are no roads—Brazil, perhaps, or Nigeria. Experiments with appropriate or alternative technologies, especially in the energy field, suggest that some simple, small-scale technologies can be as “sophisticated” as complex, large-scale technologies when the full range of side effects is taken into account and when the machine is properly matched to the task.
The techno-rebels are also disturbed by the radical imbalance of science and technology on the face of the planet, with only 3 percent of the world’s scientists in countries containing 75 percent of the global population. They favor devoting more technological attention to the needs of the world’s poor, and a more equitable sharing of the resources of outer space and the oceans. They recognize that not only are the oceans and skies part of the common heritage of the race, but that advanced technology itself could not exist without the historic contributions of many peoples, from the Indians and Arabs to the ancient Chinese.
Finally, they argue that in moving into the Third Wave we must advance, step by step, from the resource-wasteful, pollution-producing system of production used during the Second Wave era toward a more “metabolic” system that eliminates waste and pollution by making sure that the output and byproduct of each industry becomes an input for the next. The goal is a system under which no output is produced that is not an input for another production process downstream. Such asystem is not only more efficient in a production sense, it minimizes, or indeed, eliminates, damage to the bio-sphere.
Taken as a whole, this techno-rebel program provides the basis for humanizing the technological thrust.The techno-rebels are, whether they recognize it or not, agents of the Third Wave. They will not vanish but multiply in the years ahead. For they are as much a part of the advance to a new stage of civilization as our missions to Venus, our amazing computers, our biological discoveries, or our explorations of the oceanic depths.
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