Erich Fromm on Our Relation to Technology

Rediscovering ancient skills in everyday life

In the previous post, we talked about the promises of modern technology and how, according to Erich Fromm, these have not paid off.

How can we apply Erich Fromm’s criticism of technology to our everyday lives? Instead of catapulting us into a utopia of eternal youth and affluence, modern technology has condemned us to a life under constant surveillance, is destroying the planet, and, in the form of AI, now threatening to take away human employment on a grand scale. Rediscovering some of the ancient skills that we all once had may provide a way out of the problem.

Technology, capitalism and obsolescence

This kind of technological progress is particularly dangerous in combination with capitalism, which naturally leads to perverse strategies like planned obsolescence: the construction of technical devices that are intended to break a short time after their period of warranty is over, so that the customer has to buy the same thing again.

Having grown up in the logic of the capitalist system, most of us do see the point: if things kept working forever, there wouldn’t be enough demand for them to justify the existence of the factories that make them. But we also have to realise…