Derrick Jensen
Jordan Brown interviews Derrick Jensen, for the documentary film Stare Into The Lights My Pretties. In this two-part conversation, they speak about many themes surrounding technology, culture, political power, science, history, the natural world, and resistance.
Derrick Jensen is prolific author and radical environmental activist. He has written over twenty books, covering topics such as the pathology of abuse, domestic violence and dominant culture; the problems with civilisation, and strategies for resistance.
Sections: Part One
Click on the time-codes below to seek to that section of the interview.
0:00:38 Introducing Lewis Mumford and the definition of technics
0:02:53 Once you have a technology, it changes how you perceive the world
0:03:51 John Livingston, cities as places of sensory overload
0:04:45 The human-centric view of the world
0:05:02 Echo-chambers and ideological hallucinations
0:05:56 We’re embedded in these machines, we’re enthralled to these machines
0:06:39 How many machines do you have daily relationships with?
0:08:34 Democratic and Authoritarian Technics
0:11:23 Can you make a computer in your backyard?
0:14:34 The technologies are in charge
0:15:54 Frederick Winslow Taylor and mechanisation
0:17:51 Post-oil energy to power the machines, addiction
0:19:29 Unquestioned beliefs are the real authorities of any culture
0:21:40 Authoritarian technics as technological progress
0:24:32 Science conflating the ability to dominate with how we know what’s true
0:29:08 The influence of culture and technological invention
0:33:43 The fear, insecurity, and narcissism of the technoculture
0:39:13 This culture destroys connection to the real world
0:40:03 The technoculture needs to be destroyed, we won’t give it up voluntarily
0:43:18 What were once vices are now habits, The Spectacle
0:46:08 How the spectacle ups the stakes
0:46:36 Capitalism has destroyed relationships and replaced it with simulations
Part Two
0:49:25 Technoloculture and the ability to control at a distance
0:50:13 Railroads and standardised time
0:51:14 How many people actually like their alarm clocks?
0:51:52 The Panopticon
0:53:12 Today’s televisions that record your conversations
0:54:27 Declining baselines
0:55:47 Increasing acceptance of technological intrusions
0:58:04 Creeping Normalcy
0:59:36 Lewis Mumford, the Magnificent Bribe
1:06:23 Multiple Layers of Reality
1:11:59 Toxic Mimics
1:14:22 The Spectacle, disconnection and the cycle of extremes
1:20:17 How social control and The Spectacle go together
1:28:18 Social-media examples, co-opting political resistance, toxic mimics
1:32:30 The level to which so many of us are addicted is nearly invisible to us
1:34:09 Revisiting the echo-chamber, and the hallucinations of the screen world
1:36:54 Personal change does not equal social change, real resistance
