Buying technology does not make a society technologically advanced

Evidence

The recent war in the Gulf demonstrated graphically that you may buy technology and technologists if you have the money, but that does not make you a technologically advanced society. … One is sometimes left with the conclusion that those countries which have no oil have, for this very reason, done rather better economically than those that have. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1628

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the resource-curse economics literature the reader has likely encountered elsewhere; resonates with institutionalist themes from the Law Merchant readings. — connects to: Nationalization alone cannot alter technology’s embodied rationality — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 164; Societies that master a decisive material technology outcompete those that do not — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 39; Faster technology does not by itself change social practices or structures. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 257