ABSTRACT
Current thinking among the general public and within the computer science community about the uses of digital technologies is limited largely to how they can be used more widely and effectively. If there is a consensus in this era of increasing armed conflicts, it is that digital technologies are the gateway to further progress and that the so-called digital divide between the users and non-users must bring the latter into the modern world. One of today's ironies is that the computer/futurist thinkers totally ignore what the environmental scientists (who rely upon increasingly sophisticated digital technologies) are reporting; namely, that there is a rapidly deepening ecological crisis. The modernizing ideologies driving the digital revolution continue to carry forward the Enlightenment misunderstandings about the nature of cultural traditions, particularly those traditions of the cultural commons that enabled people to live more community- rather than individually-centered lives.
