Renewable Energy and Its Position in the "Technium"

In his book What Technology Wants?  Wired Magazine’s Kevin Kelly tells us about the evolution of the “technium” – the ecosystem of technologies and the way they affect us — and each other.  I think this is directly relevant to our discussion here; in fact, I go out of my way to tune into discussions on the evolution of technology generally, and its effects on all of us socially, vocationally, and psychologically.  This is important to the trajectory of renewables, of course, as the cost of clean energy is constantly falling due to the thousands of discoveries and inventions that occur each month. 

I recommend Kelly’s book as a very thoughtful study of the choices we all make regarding which technologies we will allow into our lives, and, due to the pace at which discoveries are being made, which ones we’ll have to do without. He acknowledges that we all have the option to sell our possessions and move to the Amazon jungle, and try to get by with a little impact of technology as possible – but points out that this would come at the cost of greatly limiting our options and freedoms.

A warning: this gets very philosophic very quickly. “Man is both the creator and the created,” Kelly quips, pointing out the symbiotic relationship with have with all this stuff. Shades of Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote:

In man creature and creator are united: in man there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, form giver, hammer, hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day.

See?  Ya never know what you’re gonna come across here.