A denuded landscape. The barrenness is the consequences of early 20th century copper mining. All the trees were chopped down to fuel the furnances, whilst the chemicals used (sulphur) killed off the vegetation.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Queenstown, Tasmania, 2006

Being a tourist in Queenstown for a few days was entering an old early industrial form of the technological mode of being; that of a resource-based economy, which created wealth by turning the environment into a wasteland. The new form of the technological mode of being is a digital one : where the body disappears and mind is downloaded into a computer programme or network. So said the techno-utopians of the 1980s.