Solutions

How many computers, tablets or mobile phones are made from green materials, not derived from petrochemicals? The answer is simple. Just about none. The deluded are looking to hi-tech to save them from their own pollution and greed. However, hi-tech's own greed and pollution are multiplying the problem, not solving it. The exposure of Apple's abuse of Chinese workers was just one wake-up call.

The technology sector has corrupted itself as thoroughly as the Industrial Age utilities and meat-packers. The corrupting agent is ancient: Greed. Pharmaceutical companies are now refusing to produce life-saving chemotherapy drugs for cancer patients when those chemical compounds fall out of patent protection. Why? Because they won't being making the inordinately large profit margins they have come to expect after a drug becomes generic. This was also the case with generic HIV drugs, which pharmaceutical giants tried to ban from the market when they were the key to retarding the epidemic in Africa.

The I.T./communications sector is also part of the problem, not part of the solution. Making deals with authoritarian governments to block information from citizens has become commonplace. Cooperation with spying government agencies, the standard tools of Fascism and oppression, has also been commonplace. The lack of sustained support for Julian Assange and Bradley Manning by major figures in communications and I.T. has belied their complicity with government against transparency.

Human progress has always been held back by corruption and greed. However, the current state of the planet will not allow a wide margin for procrastination by those who have any capability to solve the environmental and social problems looming ahead. Those who proclaim faith in technological salvation may well fall victim to the same fate as those who have placed all their faith in organized religion, which has done more to divide and impede than save and heal.