Science and Technology
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The Dublin based Livewire Publications has produced a new collection of essays titled Science & Capital – Radical Essays on Science & Technology, with the intention to;
“bring together some of the more radical essays on science and technology written over the years – so as to highlight some of the dangers inherent in the blind trust we are often encouraged to place in science and scientific experts”.
As well as a new introduction, the book contains five essays; including “And Yet It Moves” by Boy Igor, a situationist influenced critique of science from 1986. Also included are extracts from a Paul Feyerabend talk on “How to Defend Society against Science”.
The lengthy introduction by Phil Meyler, (aka Phil Mailer of “Portugal, the Impossible Revolution?”) has a critique of some of the perils of modern science, since its substitution of religion, and our often uncritical acceptance of “scientific experts”. It analyses the Sokal affair, a critique of post modernist ideas on science, as well as “junk science”, the internet and the spectacle of modern commodity technology.
Sempruns essay on Chernobyl deals with the media manipulation of public perceptions, using the mystification of scientific authority;
“The Ukrainian disaster was followed by a veritable bacchanal of unreason wherein not a sober voice was to be heard. For more than a month, as the winds from Chernobyl continued to blow, powers experts, who in France regretted having upset us at first by saying nothing, now undertook to reassure us by saying anything at all. Flanked by their communications people, they put on a show that defied parody
Indoctrination of this kind, so poorly disguised as information, always bears the clear marks of its origin. Uncontrollable statistics and unverifiable figures are solemnly trotted out, for all the world as though the whole of society consisted of docile civil servants; and incomprehensible acronyms – designating obscure but presumably powerful institutions – are pompously produced one after the other, like the litanies of a self-satisfied cleric who can be sure of awed respect from his audience. ”
Boy Igors “And Yet It Moves” is also situationist-influenced in its assessment of science as a spectacle of specialist hierarchical knowledge. It has a good history of science and makes many strong arguments against the scientific concepts of “scientific revolutions” a la Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos as well as a critique of Lysenko – the Soviet geneticist who was Stalins favourite scientist – and the scientistic ideals of Marxist Leninism.
Video Surveillance, CCTV cameras and ever-expanding Big Brother surveillance are attacked and analysed in an essay by the French Collective group.