Earth_Island_Journal_-_Spring_2020

EARTH ISLAND JOURNAL • SPRING 2020 43

enough awareness of the heavy propaganda for computers

as “the” way to help us decentralize. Computers and later

the Internet being championed as the way to [decentralize]

perversely helped co-opt large movements of people who

wanted a more generally decentralized, and more nature-

based, culture and development path, people who basically

wanted to go back to the land, to leave the big cities.

If you had to sum it up, what’s the message you’d like

to share in terms of technology?

It’s too big for a soundbite. But for now, think of how the

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have a warehouse, and how this is linked to destroying local

businesses. We should be talking about what is essential in

an economy: the ways people use nature and other people to

make ends meet, and basically, it should be about providing

NWZW]ZVMML[VW\IJW]\I[a[\MU\PI\IZ\QÅKQITTacreates needs.

Using psychological manipulation to encourage people

to consume was tied to economists arguing that the only

way to avoid another economic depression was to integrate

economies around the world, in other words to create one

global system. This amalgamation was linked to the creation

of the EU and so on, to the idea that to avoid another war we

need one single system.

Most people see the EU as a relatively benign force and

often as the only counter-pole to the American system. But

actually, it was an attempt to amalgamate and integrate to

suit the needs of big business. Big business wanted to grow

beyond national boundaries, and they didn’t want to have to

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with some people driving on the left side of the road and

some on the right. They needed standardization, and the

computer and the Internet were an integral part of that.

How would you change the situation?

To paint it dramatically: What would it be like to ban multinational

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would be a challenge. But multinationals using the Internet

are basically impossible to tax. Look at Apple, at Google. And

these technologies are linked to massive manipulation, not

just in terms of manufacturing needs, but even [in terms of]

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toward democratizing the Internet would be in incremental

ways.

Using satellites and the Internet for climate monitoring,

for emergency needs, and so on makes sense; having built up

that infrastructure and having those tools, it would be unwise

not to make use of them for many purposes. But, again in an

ideal world, we’d be looking at the way that the whole weap-

ons race is linked to the race into space, and we would be

putting an end to that. We would be looking at the ecological

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be talking about slowing down and shrinking our use of the

Internet for global business, the way that several European

countries have done with bans on advertising.

Helena Norberg-Hodge | Conversation

Norberg-Hodge spent decades working and living with Indigenous people in Ladakh, India. Her work there helped crystalize her understanding of

the need for decentralized political and economic structures as well as holistic knowledge of local ecologies.

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