Resource efficiency is the wrong metric. We should use nature as the measure, using nature's wisdom as a template for our economic systems.
Douglas TompkinsRead
If you just hold your cell phone for 30 seconds and think backwards through its production, you have the entire techno-industrial culture wrapped up there. You can't have that device without everything that goes with it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the complex cultural and industrial processes behind everyday technology.
Douglas Tompkins highlights the vast interconnectedness of technology and culture by suggesting that a simple act of holding a cell phone prompts reflection on the multitude of processes, resources, and societal impacts involved in its production. It serves as a reminder that our modern conveniences come with a significant history and a network of cultural implications that shape our lives.
Themes
TechnologyCultureProductionCell PhoneSociety
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about the impact of smartphones on modern society.
More from Douglas Tompkins
All quotes →I just realized at least what I was doing was making a lot of stuff that nobody needed and pushing a consumerist society. So I went to do something else.
Douglas TompkinsRead
The byproduct of the main thrust to protect the biodiversity of a given place is that you get especially young people out to the parks, because it will be future generations that will have to value these landscapes and these ecosystems and make sure that nobody is changing the law.
Douglas TompkinsRead
Similar quotes
Error-prone or biased artificial-intelligence systems have the potential to taint our social ecosystem in ways that are initially hard to detect, harmful in the long term, and expensive - or even impossible - to reverse.
Kate CrawfordRead
An invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started.
Tim O'ReillyRead
If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.
Richard StallmanRead
Our social networks, our news, our mundane existence and our important moments are all mediated by algorithms, whose proprietary, profit-driven, ad-financed nature seeps into every small micro-interaction.
Zeynep TufekciRead
The steam-engine I call fire-demon and great; but it is nothing to the invention of fire.
Thomas CarlyleRead
Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things.
Richard P. FeynmanRead