The 1980s and 1990s witnessed the creation of a prosthetic culture. A prosthetic is an artificial device that replaces a human function, and they’re valuable technologies for those who have lost the use of the function in question. If you’ve lost a leg via accident or illness, for example an artificial leg that lets you walk again is a very good thing to have. Still, when a society starts convincing people to saw off their own legs so businesses can sell them artificial ones, something has gone wrong — and that’s not too far from the situation we’re in today.
-John Michael Greer, 5.17.06
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