I would have more sympathy for this view if the tech industry were doing useful things to enable a functioning society to exist in 100 years time but in the vast majority of cases they’re simply not.
We desperately need high tech solutions to address climate change and yet barely any tech companies are bothering to get involved, preferring instead to build disposable crap that worsens the problem rather than alleviating it.
Lots of good examples of political figures that did have long term impact. But here’s another angle: politics helps determine what kind of, and how many, tech advances happen in several ways: more or less research funding, supporting some fields over others, strengthening or weakening IP laws (I’m not commenting here on which of those would have which effect) more or less grant money for innovative small companies, more or less propoganda opposing results of scientific inquiry or demonizing scientists, laws that affect income distribution which in turn affects how many people are able to buy new products…
Not all of the electorate.
Indeed; some of us remember all too well.
Another guy who never won the popular vote.
Thank you, electoral college.
Countercounterpoint, the electorate is forced to relearn lessons over and over again.
100 years? Small comfort to those who will have to live through the aftermath of the Trump disaster. And assuming the planet survives.
Our tools will not serve us until we own them (something Doctorow talks about elsewhere), until we own the skills and knowledge we have in our heads to use those tools, (ditto) and until we take the functionality of those tools away from the elite neophytes who know everything about writing code but very little about anything else.
Still waiting for a good, universally available app to do useful math and modeling on my phone. Just putting that out there.
Oh, the planet itself will still be here, most likely.
Every living being that currently inhabits the surface of this planet, though?
That’s another matter, all together.
I agree, in one hundred years nobody will remember who was President when climate change really took off.
Not if we can put our brains in to computers!
That remains to be seen, as least as far as how the US gov works.
As for the original authors point, it may seem a bit cold and distant, but it is there. Certainly various power struggles have shaped our world. But remember the reasons for war are generally over resources. The fact that most people have most of their basic needs met is one reason we are living in one of the mot peaceful times in human history. It is why there won’t be an actual Civil War II in America, as we are all mostly placated and happy. I mean nothing is near what my grandmother lived through during the depression. The places with the worst turmoil are the places where people stand to gain more fighting, than they stand to lose.
Of course this is all big picture stuff, which may seem a bit silly when you focus on the details of problems we still have and examples of shit still going on in the world.
Oh, are we?
Thanks for glibly misspeaking on my behalf about how I feel; I just love it when people that I haven’t even met face to face do that.
(If your actual point was that many people are not nearly ‘uncomfortable’ enough to actually get up off their asses and do anything that will make a difference, that statement I might agree with.)
You call that living?
This. Right here.
I hope things go well enough so that we can afford to forget Trump. But I’m a hardcore pessimist now.
Have fun with that…
And those who do know history are:
a) just plained doomed?
b) doomed to repeat it, along with the know-nothings, with with added foreboding?
c) prone to screaming, “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” frequently?
Not a good comparison. Tokugawa is considered the end of the Warring States period of Japanese history, finally putting an stable end to hundreds of years of civil wars.
Some say that this was achieved by The Taiko who preceded Tokugawa but since he left a power vacuum by lacking a viable successor this isn’t accurate.
I was thinking more of his persecution of foreigners and closing Japan off from the rest of the world.
d) all of the above
