A notable excerpt from Nate Hagens' talk with Daniel Schmachtenberger describes how tech is not values neutral and that animism died with the invention of the plow:
from here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nkv5mpBA8o4&t=2204s to around 50:00
"Tech that is highly advantageous to use is obligate"
"It codes a pattern of human behavior"
https://consilienceproject.org/technology-is-not-values-neutral/
Relevant excerpts from Wilbur's Sex, Ecology and Spirituality:
excerpt from linkedin post:
"New article from the Consilience Project on how technologies are not values-neutral but directly affect psychologies and cultures...and how those effects can be factored into the technology design process...and need to be if humanity is to do well moving forward.
This will likely be one of those topics that seem obvious after reading, but if asked ahead of time, most people would express a different sense, ie, it's not generally intuitive, but once seen clearly, it is. Worth reading as this is an essential element of the future of culture and human conditioning.
From the article: "Even a technology as simple as the plow is created with values in mind, such as ease of labor, speed of work, and a desire for food surpluses that create a feeling of safety. It serves these values by affecting material outcomes, such as preparing fields for agriculture. The plow would also lead to urban fortifications for storing and protecting food surpluses, and thus change the nature of human habitats, warfare, and architecture. The plow favors men as farmers due to the upper body strength needed to use it, which changed ideologies about the respective value of the sexes. The plow led eventually to certain forms of animal domestication, in the long run altering the relationship between humans and the natural world, and thus moving religious beliefs from animistic to theocentric. Normalization of animal-drawn plowing as the basis of agriculture made it difficult for humans to value animals as sacred and as equal or surpassing humans in worth. It is hard to worship the sacred spirit of an animal that must be beaten all day to pull a plow. Dominion over animals in this way justified the spread of a cultural narrative that humanity’s role is to control nature, rather than to be a part of nature, which laid the foundations for a mindset that eventually resulted in the industrial revolution. These and countless other changes to human minds, behaviors, and culture followed from the invention of the plow.
"Of course, the plow was not created with these outcomes in mind, nor could they have been predicted by those who first built and used them. Technologies co-evolve with value systems—neither determines the other, even though they are intimately related. Whole epochs of civilization, as ways of life and culture, come to be defined by certain sets of technologies and infrastructures.""
-Daniel Schmachtenberger