TechNoLove
Jonathan Franzen takes to the New York Times op-ed page to proclaim that — oh yes, indeedy — technology is killing love. Blackberries aren’t birds, birds are part of the environment, the environment is love, and love means facing death directly, or something like that:
To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.
Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.