Techno
Penuria
Phobia
- …
Techno
Penuria
Phobia
- …
Technopenuriaphobia
Take back your life.
Reclaim your ability to live on planet Earth.
You might think you have problems now...
...but you ain't seen nuthin' yet.
What is TechnoPenuriaPhobia (TPP) ?
The term 'technopenuriaphobia' was coined in 2004 by Clinton Callahan in Chapter 9 of the Possibility Manager Handbook.
Technopenuriaphobia means 'the fear of the lack of technology'... the fear that arises in those circumstances where the Technology you have been unconsciously relying threatens to vanish, like when the car stops in a dark forest road in the middle of a rainy night, when the elevator stops between floors, when the air conditioner goes out, when the remote control does not operate, when you cannot find a WiFi connection... on and on.
The need for the word 'Technopenuriaphobia' came almost exactly forty-years after the invention of the term, 'Technophobia', which means 'the fear of technology'. So much new Technology was being invented such as microwave ovens, fax machines, garage door openers, cell phones, microprocessors, computers, liquid crystal displays, LED lights, online banks, cash machines, on and on. The new Technology caused so much fear it was putting people into neurotic breakdowns. Now, the fear of possibly losing that same Technology brings up an even greater fear: Technopenuriaphobia, the fear of losing the Technology 'on which your life depends'.
The word 'penuria' comes from the Latin and means 'scarcity', or 'deficiency'.
It is interesting to note that the word 'technophobia,' which means 'the fear of technology and its effects', first appeared around 1964. Here it is forty years later and we now have 'technopenuriaphobia'. the fear of a lack of technology! We have grown so dependent on modern technology in this past generation that we can no longer live on our own planet without it.
An ideal environment for beginning technopenuria healing Experiments is in the arena of healing yourself, your relationship, and your family of this disease of contemporary life.
In our modern culture we are born high up on a technological ladder. Hanging out before us in the sky, bright as a Las Vegas casino sign, is the vision of the fabled good life that we are encouraged to strive for. We think we can achieve the good life only if we surround ourselves with enough labor saving, comfort providing, or entertainment devices. Even without trying to we are completely buffered from life on planet earth with scores of modern conveniences.
We learned that if you want food, all you have to do is go to the cupboard, the refrigerator or the freezer and open up boxes, cans, plastic bags, or cartons and there is an abundance of food. If the food starts to get low at home, go to the supermarket and there you will find food in such quantity and variety as to shame any king, all ready for the taking. Load up your basket and haul it home to eat. Food comes from the grocery store.
If you need money, for example, to buy the food, just give the people a little plastic card and type in a code number or write your name and the food is instantly paid for. If you want cash, use the same card and go to a cash machine or a bank teller. The money comes pouring out by the handfuls.You want light? Flip a switch. Water? Turn a handle. New clothes? Use that plastic card again. Want to talk to somebody? Autodial their number wherever you are from your cell phone. Need to go somewhere? Don’t walk; use a machine: bicycle, car, bus, train, boat or plane. Machines take you rapidly and comfortably anywhere in the world.
The Danger Of Identifying With A System
TechnoPenuriaPhobia Detection
We forget how absolutely astonishing the modern world is. We live in a culture and a time where wonder-filled technological conveniences rule our lives. In this “heaven” we can’t imagine that there could be a problem. But there is. The problem is that we are born high up on a technological ladder. We are skilled at living a modern life within technology. The technology is not the problem. The problem is the gap between us and planet earth.
We subconsciously sense that the rungs below us on the ladder of technology are missing. If we dare to look down we realize deep in our guts that those rungs are no longer in place. If we were to take one step down or somehow slip we would instantly be in danger. A hidden ceaseless fear rumbles silently deep in our belly.
The rungs disappear the moment we forget that we and planet earth are one. In our headlong rush toward the tantalizing modern comforts of tomorrow-land we have forgotten how to live without technology. We have high-tech but we are missing low-tech. We cannot sleep without a bed, eat without a supermarket, see without a streetlight, move without a car, or be with ourselves without distractive media.
We have screwed ourselves. We have lost the original technology that created civilization: fire starting, food finding, clothes making, shaping shelter and tools out of whatever comes to hand. The loss of low-tech knowledge creates a lethal gap between us and our planet, and that gap is now filled with unconscious fear: technopenuriaphobia.There is already a significant body of research proving that harm is done to motor skills and hand-eye coordination by placing children in front of computer and television screens in the years when they need to be developing three-dimensional perceptions and physical dexterity. This psycho-emotional damage may be irreversible. Technopenuriaphobia is an additional damage caused by long-term exposure to a profound fear that we are not aware of and have no culturally embraced cure for.
TPP is a particularly Western affliction because you must first live with advanced technologies for a generation before the next generation forgets that you ever did not have them. One-hundred-thousand years of hard-earned life-knowledge vanishes from our common inheritance during one generation of being a city dweller. Considering the virulent Westernization of the rest of the world, technopenuriaphobia will quite likely infect millions if not billions more in the near future.
Getting dropped into the gap between planet and technology can happen in an instant when the elevator stops between floors, the batteries go dead, or the store is closed. A million different accidents can puncture the illusion of our comfortable little techno-world. We know bodily that if we were to somehow be separated from our conveniences – even just a few of them – we would be on very shaky ground.
Unless we have made special efforts to train ourselves in outdoor living skills, we all have technopenuriaphobia bothering us deep in our soul. TPP decreases the number of options from which we can choose and thereby forces certain lifestyles upon us that we assume are without alternatives – “What do you mean I could wear out my old shoes before ordering new ones on the Internet?” “What do you mean unplug the TV?” If a high level of technology must be supported, we become like goldfish living precariously in a glass bowl in the desert.
So what can we do? How can we heal ourselves from TPP? How can we get free of this insidious fear?Assuredly it takes work to heal oneself of TPP. Work and time. You can approach the work as fun work, but time to do that work will not come without you making it. Listed below are ideas for Edgework Experiments to heal yourself of this modern day affliction.
By the way, TPP Edgework Experiments are excellent activities to share with children. Anti-technopenuriaphobia measures are a powerful intervention that safeguards the basic sanity and self-esteem of your children for their whole lives. Your efforts may last for generations because your children could well pass the benefit on to their own children, and their children’s children after that.
TechnoPenuriaPhobia Healing
Make Fire
without a match or lighter
Make Shelter
Make your own debris hut
- One long strong ridge pole at least the diameter of your wrist. A little bit longer than your total body length with your arms stretched up.
- Support the ridgepole at about waist height somehow eg, two support poles with forked ends, or on a big rock, or on a big log etc
- Then find sticks to form the “ribs”. They form the skeleton of your hut
- Find a forked branch to scratch up leaves, sticks, pine needles, any kind of small forest debris that you can find.
- Pile the debris 2 feet thick on top of your skeleton in the summer or 3 - 4 feet thick in the winter.
- Fill the inside with spacer material to create separation from the ground and then line it with something soft to lie on eg, dried grass.
- You are effectively creating an oversized sleeping bag out of sticks and debris - do what you can to minimize air exchange.
- Choose your site carefully - Consider, for example: ground moisture, wind exposure, flatness, flood risk, tree fall risk, material availability.
Outer Low-Tech Skills
Please remember, we are not proposing a back-to-nature anti-technology movement. We are not promoting medieval or tribal lifestyles. The point is to fill a gap where you are noncommittal, hollow, and inauthentic due to a deep abiding terror.
We are encouraging you to reclaim non-technical options in your everyday actions and thoughts.
We are begging you to install low-tech rungs in the ladder of technology to fill the gap between you and planet Earth so as to build a stable foundation on which you can relax.
While reading through this sample list below, mark which TPP Experiments are attractive to you, and jot down notes about others that you may think of.This does not mean that you promise to do these Experiments, or even that you know how to do these Experiments. You are simply marking or creating Experiments that might turn you on to try.
You can connect to immensely intelligent and abundant outer resources that modern culture knows nothing about.
![Section image](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="1600" height="900"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>)
Collect and dry your own Squash Seeds
TECHNOPP.01
You can eat the seeds later, or plant them to grow your own squash!
Change 4 square meters of land into a Vegetable Garden
TECHNOPP.02
Inner Permaculture begins with Outer Permaculture.
Even if it is only potted tomatoes on your balcony, those tomatoes will taste different from store-bought. Vegetables grow in the dirt. There are bugs. There are gophers. The sun matters. The rain matters. Vegetables eat cow manure and rotting dead stuff. Then you eat the vegetables. This is Edgework.
Make your own Shoes out of Recycled Car Tires
TECHNOPP.03
After walking in them for 50,000 miles you can get them retreaded!
Hand-Carve Your Own Chopsticks
TECHNOPP.04
and use them to eat meals including Haferflockenschleim and spaghetti.
Hand-Sew A Cloth Or Leather Pouch
TECHNOPP.05
for your chopsticks.
for your Possibility Stone for in your pocket or around your neck
Start A Fire Without Matches or Lighter
TECHNOPP.06
Hand-Carve A Wooden Spoon
TECHNOPP.07
that fits your own hand, use it for eating all your meals at the PLab
Practice Stacking Rocks
TECHNOPP.08
Collect Three stones
Identify Local Edible Plants
TECHNOPP.09
Go outside and learn to identify local edible plants, harvest them, cook and eat them for some of the meals.
Identify and use wild edible plants
Build a snowman or an igloo together in 30 minutes
TECHNOPP.10
Share The Joys Of Protecting And Sharing Seeds
TECHNOPP.11
http://kokopelli-semences.fr
Go Barefoot
TECHNOPP.12
Taking your shoes off and exposing the sensitive soles of your feet to the textures and temperatures of the surface of planet earth adds dimensions to your experience. Walk barefoot, even in the rain. (Leaving bare footprints in the snow really makes your neighbors wonder about you.) Take your shoes and socks off at the office. Whose office is it anyway? Make your house a shoes-off house.
Do Without
TECHNOPP.13
Try fasting for a day or three. Just drink water, tea or juice. Walk instead of using any machines to get you places all week. Walk through stores and do not buy anything. Put away the TV. Turn off your phone. Have radio-free days. Clean out your garage and attic. Enter your weekend without a plan. Be silent for three days. Do without speaking. Do without sugar or meat or coffee for three days.
Go Camping
TECHNOPP.14
Just get outside into nature for an hour, a day, a week, a month. Step away from the containment of civilization and live on a wide open sandy beach, in the middle of a forest, in the rocky desert, on top of a mountain, beside a freshwater lake. As you become adjusted to camping, practice taking less and less civilization with you. Start with leaving behind the CD player, the bicycle, the camera. The lighter your backpack, the more the TPP gap is filled in.
Sit In The Mud
TECHNOPP.15
Mud has strong cleansing and healing properties. Mud is the earth. You are made of mud. You do not have to sit in it, but stop considering mud as dirt. Our mothers trained us to be so clean, to keep our clothes clean, to keep our face clean. Heal yourself and get dirty! Hold mud. Get in contact with mud. Paint yourself with mud. The kids can show you how.
Eat Bugs
TECHNOPP.16
Yes. There are 1,462 recorded species of edible insects. Get fried grasshoppers with chili, salt and lemon in Mexico; fried cicadas and silk moth pupae in Japan; roasted termites and crickets in Nigeria; snails are a delicacy in France; and you can get canned baby bees, chocolate covered ants, and stir-fried meal worms in the U.S. Suck the back ends of water bugs at vegetable markets in Thailand, and eat witchetty grubs and Bogong moths in Australia. And don’t forget Gnat Soufflé! The menu is wide and varied, and rich in protein and vitamins. For recipes check out The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook by David George Gordon.
Take Things Apart and Fix Them
TECHNOPP.17
We are so accustomed to giving things to repair people or throwing things away that we do not have a relationship to fixing things anymore. Instead, try to fix things yourself. Simple little things, big complex things, simply give it a try. Even if you have absolutely no idea how, grab your screwdriver, take the broken thing apart and follow your intuitive wisdom. Fiddle around. Just make sure it is unplugged first and then you will not blow yourself up. Even when professional repair people say it cannot be done or cannot be fixed, try your best guess yourself. Be bold and trust yourself. Your successes will serve as reference points for creating possibility in seemingly impossible relationship situations.
Walk Twenty Miles
TECHNOPP.18
We know how to pilot a one-ton internal-combustion ground-machine at speeds of seventy-five miles per hour, but can we walk twenty miles when our car breaks down? Six leagues is not so far. The old California missions were built about twenty miles apart because the monks could walk from one mission to the next in about a day. Knowing that you can walk twenty miles whenever you want to makes the whole planet your home again.
Learn To Dance Together
TECHNOPP.19
New England style country dancing with a caller yelling out what to do next.
Folk dancing.
Square dancing.
Circle and line dancing.Learn Ancient Hunting Tools
TECHNOPP.19
Learn to use ancient hunting tools such as a boomerang, blow gun, sling, and bow and arrow.
Eat Only Whole and Raw Foods
TECHNOPP.19
for a set time
Visit Third-World cultures
TECHNOPP.19
Weave Cloth
TECHNOPP.19
Make your own
TECHNOPP.19
soap, candles, pottery, baskets, paper
weaving baskets
Write With Feathers
TECHNOPP.19
Flake Stone Implements
TECHNOPP.19
Milk A Cow
TECHNOPP.19
Sword Work
TECHNOPP.19
Learn To Identify Stars
TECHNOPP.19
Learn to identify the North Star and how to find it from other constellations such as Orion and Casseopia
Make Your Own Knife
TECHNOPP.19
Cut and grind to sharpness your own throwing knife out of steel bar stock, then practice knife throwing
Carry Your Own Knife
TECHNOPP.19
Learn to identify the North Star and how to find it from other constellations such as Orion and Casseopia
Practice Making Lock-Pick Tools
TECHNOPP.19
Pick locks.
Sing Until The Song Sings You
TECHNOPP.19
And Learn and sing Barbershop Quartet songs
Practice Juggling
TECHNOPP.19
also in pairs
Body Painting
TECHNOPP.19
in men's culture and women's culture
Inner Low-Tech Skills
No one can connect you to your own inner resources.
More interestingly...
No one can stop you from connecting to those inner resources yourself.
Attention
Intention
Intuition
Instinct
Vision
Passion
Find Your Energetic Center
Tap Into Your Vision
Use Your Gremlin
Use Your Feelings and Emotions
Ignite Your Energetic Tools
Enter Not Knowing
Open Your Pearl
Connect to Your Imagination
Stand in the Values of Your Gameworld
Use Your Voice
Connect to Gaia
Connect to your Bright Principles
Connect to Other People's Resources
Choice Making, Wisdom Counsel, Dynamic Facilitation, Circular Meeting Technologies
Connect to the Void
Connect to Your Archetypal Lineage
Make Your Grounding Cord
Make Your Bubble
Further Experiments To Try
- Play baseball all on one team
- Practice Intuition – build your intuition muscles, face and remove your blocks
- Mini vision quest in the woods.
- Journey Into The Mountain.
- Make short 3 minute film interviews with each person about the purpose of their life. Review them with feedback and coaching.
- Build with leather and cord a sling (like David and Goliath) and practice using it to accurately throw stones.
- Carve your own wooden spear and practice spear throwing.
- Do stagework – create scenes of low drama to high drama, healing, realization and transformation.
- Telling stories about your family's heroes. If certain of your ancestors did not do what they did you would not have been born. Tell what these heroes did. Tell what you have done as a hero for future generations.
- Use soft foam balls to do the Problems process (ask Nicola Nagel).
- Do the Stellating Gremlin initiation.
- Creating new centering exercises in small groups and teach them to the other small groups.
- Practice new meeting technologies, such as: The Problem Is The Solution, Frying Pan, Phoenix Process, M.E.S.S. (Mayan Extraordinary Synergy System), Open Space (from Harrison Owen www.openspaceworld.org ), Wisdom Council (from Jim Rough www.dynamicfacilitation.com), etc.
- Create exercises for practicing the 7 Core Skills of Possibility Management: contact, centering, being unhookable, holding and navigating space, going stellar with feelings, creating possibility, self-marketing.
- Practice applying various Possibility Manager Tool Belt tools in stagework situations: disk of nothing, wand of declaration, bag of things, is-glue and dissolver, possibility stone, sword of clarity, voice blaster, clicker for going nonlinear, etc.
- Doing self-surgeries, such as Trust Replacement Surgery, Sewing Up Brain Splits from childhood, Rewiring Fear so that fear equals fear, Bypassing Mind Machines (identifying the 5 kinds of Mind Machines as various survival strategies).
- Practice making the bubble and the grounding cord, various ways to cleanse the bubble.
- Practice holding personal bubble space and work space at the same time.
- Practice splitting your Point of Origin, so that you put one part on the person or people you are serving, and one part on the source of a thoughtmap or distinction, so that you newly originate what you communicate specifically for that person or group and the information is coming directly from the source through you to them and not coming from your mind.
- Practice using the Box as a one centimeter cube for farfetching.
- Practicing The Box is Optional exercise.
- Practice using the Feelings Orchestra to complete real incomplete emotions, such as if someone close dies (e.g. Nelson Mandela, who was close to all of us), someone loses a baby, or ends a relationship, if there is a natural disaster (e.g. hurricane in Philippines) to consciously connect in and grieve and rage and be afraid with the people.
- Practice men's and women's culture circles.
- Bring in guest trainers for a day or half-day or evening to deliver a specific extra-special process or experience for participants
- This website is a Bubble in the Bubble Map of the massively-multiplayer online-and-offline thoughtware-upgrade personal-transformation game called StartOver.xyz. It is a doorway to experiments that upgrade your thoughtware so you can create more possibility. Your knowledge is what you think about. Your thoughtware is what you use to think with. When you change your thoughtware, you go through a liquid state as your mind reorganizes itself. Liquid states can bring up transformational feelings and emotions. Please read this website responsibly. By upgrading your thoughtware you build matrix to hold more consciousness. No one can do this for you. No one can stop you from doing it. Our theory is that when we collectively build one million more Matrix Points we will change the morphogenetic field of the human race for the better. Reading this whole website is worth 1 Matrix Point. Doing any of the experiments earns you additional Matrix Points. Please use Matrix Code TECHNOPP.00 to log your Matrix Points earned at this website on http://StartOver.xyz. Thank you for playing full out!
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