Posted by I was flipping through the channels last weekend when I saw that Jurassic Park was on TV. I watched for a few minutes before re-starting the channel flippage. Later in the day, I watched some vague story about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The first Jurassic Park and the book that spawned it popped into my head. There is a scene at the end where the park’s creator, John Hammond, declares his intention to rebuild Jurassic Park, that he sees now that they relied too much on automation and the next time they’d get it right. “Creation is an act of sheer will!” Ellie Sattler, the main female lead, shouts him down, pointing out that one can’t control creation and that the only thing that matters are people, the ones we care about.
The book and the movie are, in part, a repudiation of technological worship. (And there is a certain irony that Jurassic Park itself was a leap forward in cinema techmology). I’m not a luddite but when I see coverage of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I can’t help but think that perhaps we’re letting our technologies get out of control. Insatiable demand and shrinking supply is leading us to tap ever more precarious stores of natural resources. Drill, baby, drill. So we just up the techmology and don’t ask whether we should be pursuing such supplies in the first place.
Technology as an sheer act of will? Now, I’m not a communitarian fantasy seeker. I lean towards the side that believes in the steady march of progress but I’m not sure that our salvation lies in the endless bounds of technological development. At some point, humankind will need to re-approach living in equilibrium with this planet, lest we be subjected to whips and scorns of an angry nature. Lest we really do become the interplanetary corporate looters of Avatar or the virus of The Matrix’s Agent Smith’s imagination. And the problem with a virus is that it eventually dies once it’s consumed everything available to it.
Photo Credit: AP
