released 11/5/2021

David E. Nye’s Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (MIT Press, 1998) looked at how the kinds of choices our society has made about energy use have reshaped the home, the factory, the city, and the countryside, as well as our imaginations and our sense of human possibility. Early in the book, Nye rejects the idea of technological determinism — the idea that certain technologies render inevitable certain social outcomes. He insists that societies do have choices about how they use technologies, but that once choices are made and established both politically and economically, a definite momentum is established. In a 1999 interview from Volume 37 of the Mars Hill Tapes, Nye talks with Ken Myers about the central ideas in his book.

19 minutes

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