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The most recent topic explored by the thinkers and activists who make up the Great Transition Network was “Technology and the Future.” As writer after writer posted their thoughts, it was heartening to see that almost all recognize that technology cannot provide real solutions to the many crises we face.

I was also happy that Professor William Robinson, author of a number of books on the global economy, highlighted the clear connection between computer technologies and the further entrenchment of globalization today.

As anyone who has followed my work will know, globalization is of particular interest to me: for more than 40 years I’ve been studying its impacts on different cultures and societies around the world.

From Ladakh and Bhutan to Sweden and Australia, a clear pattern has emerged: as people are pushed into deepening dependence on large-scale, technological systems, ecological and social crises escalate.

I’m not the only one to have seen this. In the International Forum on Globalization — a network I co-founded in 1992 — I worked with forty writers, journalists, academics and social and environmental leaders from around the world to inform the public about the ways in which “free-trade” treaties, the principal drivers of globalization, have eroded democracy, destroyed livelihoods and accelerated resource extraction.

In countries as disparate as Sweden and India, I have seen how globalization intensifies competition for jobs and resources, leading to dramatic social breakdown — including not only ethnic and religious conflict but also depression, alcoholism and suicide.

Professor Robinson wrote that we are “at the brink of another round of restructuring and transformation based on a much more advanced digitalisation of the entire global economy.” This is true, but the link between globalization and technological expansion began well before the computer era.

Large-scale, technological apparatuses can be understood as the arms and legs of centralized profit-making. And while 5G networks, satellites, mass data-harvesting, artificial intelligence and virtual reality will allow the colonization of still more physical, economic and mental space by multinational corporations, technologies like fossil fuels, global trading infrastructures, and television have already helped to impose a corporate-run consumer-based economy in almost every corner of the globe.

For reasons that are increasingly evident, an acceleration of this process is the last thing we need in a time of serious social and environmental crises. What’s more, the technologies themselves — from the sensors to the satellites — all rely heavily on scarce resources, not least rare earth minerals.

Some of the world’s richest corporations are now racing each other to extract these minerals from the deepest seabeds and from the surface of Mars. It has been estimated that the internet alone — with its largely invisible data warehouses (much of it manned by exploited labor in the “developing” world) — will use up a fifth of global electricity consumption by 2025.

And for what? So that we can all spend more time immersed in and addicted to virtual worlds? So that we can automate agriculture, and drive more communities off the land into swelling urban slums? So that drones can deliver our online purchases without an iota of face-to-face contact?

When thinking about technology from within an already high-tech, urban context, we can easily forget that nearly half the global population still lives in villages, still connected to the land. This is not to say that their way of life is not under threat — far from it.

Ladakh, the Himalayan region where I lived and worked for several decades, was unconnected to the outside world by even a road until the 1960s. But today you can find processed corporate food, smartphones, mountains of plastic waste, traffic jams and other signs of “modernity” in the capital, Leh.

The first steps on this path were taken in the mid-1970s when, in the name of “development,” massive resources went into building up the energy, communications and transport infrastructures needed to tie Ladakh to the global economy.

Another step involved pulling Ladakhi children out of their villages into western-style schools, where they learned none of the place-based skills that supported Ladakh’s culture for centuries and instead were trained into the technological-modernist paradigm.

Together, these forces are pushing the traditional way of life to the brink of extinction.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Children's Health Defense.