Hacking the low tech future What will happen to the technology
industry in an age of expensive energy? The technology industry
has grown up in an age of cheap and abundant energy, and that
has shaped, deeply and fundamentally, the way it sees the world,
what it chooses to make, and how it designs what it does. You
have to think only of the short lifespan of the devices, the
fact that they are discarded, not upgraded, when technology
moves on; or the emerging service designs based on the world of
the cloud; and always on, on demand access. But the age of cheap
and abundant energy is coming to a close. It is about to become
scarcer and more expensive. How does the technology energy need
to respond? It’s worth, quickly, making the case about energy,
for not everyone believes this. John Michael Greer, in his book
The Ecotechnic Future, uses the analogy of a group of field mice
who find one day that someone has dumped a huge pile of grain in
a corner of their field. They eat it and multiply, until the
grain starts