Technology is a drug.
We can't get enough of it.
We feed it to our kids and watch them grow on the forced diet of
desensitization. Switch on the TV and someone will tell you 50,000
people died in India. Two seconds later you're watching a comedy.
Technology can do that. It gives us simulated realities that make us
oblivious to the real world. Heroin does the same thing. So do most
class A drugs. Basically, we are all addicts - addicted to the comfort
and convenience that technology provides - addicted to the notion that
progress is directly related to the size of your computer screen. Of
course it is. We must be right. We come from the developed world. We're
already developed. Sure. Then again, wealthy kids from America shoot
each other. Poor kids in Soweto can't stop smiling.
So who's developed?
I met an Aborigine in Arnhemland, Australia - his nephews showed me
symbols where I saw trees and rainbows through smoked glass. They could
see fish through clouded water. I couldn't even see my own reflection.
I must have forgotten how.
When I look in front of me, I see two paths - spiritual or material.
Two worlds - developed or developing. You decide which is which. We're
still in the wake of millennium paranoia - earthquakes, floods, end of
world scenarios, cult suicides, viral diseases that eat into our
computer realities. This is our developed world.
Then, as Nelson Mandela says 'We are free to be free'.
I guess we make our own prophecies.
Nitin Sawhney - March 2001
