Technofasting Illich: Wisdom for Our Age of Technotantalization

• In Event: The Land and the Local: Illich, Gandhi, and Other Friends

Abstract

This paper celebrates the wisdom of technofasting in the age of technotantalization. Studying Tantalus’ traps of gluttony, Ivan Illich reveals the self imprisonment and the attendant loss of freedoms that accompany moderns: out-of-control growing gluttony for all things promoted as “state-of-the-art technological advancements”—whether zooming into space, or prying open and preying upon the most fundamental cellular structures of human and non-human bodies for cloning the best and the most beautiful, while improving on all the defects and deficiencies of Nature. Borrowing from and extending Illich’s discussion of convivial and industrial tools, this paper uses a narrative, arts-informed methodology to examine possibilities for slow academe.

Authors

• David A. Greenwood, Lakehead University

• Madhu Suri Suri Prakash, The Pennsylvania State University