‘It’s simply being pointed out that for the last 40+ years there’s been this subculture that’s taken it as an article of faith that the developments of technology would, by virtue of merely existing, create a utopia for us (or as near could exist in the real world); that is, they would bring about " fairness, equity and prosperity for everyone." Which isn’t what happened…’
We have done astoundingly well easing poverty. What do you want, egg in your beer? Leave aside that no one sane promised utopia or listened to those that did.
Really interesting.
I think we don’t have to let our future in the hands of tech moguls, as consumers and (more importantly) citizens we can take those decisions.
One example. Plastic pollution. You have a lot of ways to deal with the accumulation of plastic in the environment :
The “HARD TECH” way, building boat or nets filtering the oceans. Sound great until you realise how much fuel those thing burn, how can they sort waste from animals and plants, and doesn’t deal with the fact the vast majority of plastic waste is microscopic (it is not my own opinion, this is the opinion of biologists). More fundamentally it doesn’t solve the problem, it manage the problem.
The “DO WE NEED IT” way, recently France ban the use of single use lightweight plastic bags (I hear you screaming in agony, libertarians). By imposing this norm we saw the apparition new biodegradable plastic bags, the increase in use of recyclable materials (paper) and more and more people simply take their own bag to the market. More European countries plan to do the same. (And a lot of islands already forbid them like Hawaii)
I guess my point is : don’t wait for private companies to figure how to make profit on environmental or social problems. Solve them as citizens, solve them as lobbyist and associations.
But we’re also not living in a drastically improved society I was promised as a child.
which then references a Wikipedia article about Gamergate, and an article by a blogger who sadly lost his little girl. Both unfortunate, but not exactly on point.
Any informed look at poverty, malnutrition, disease, discrimination both in the first world and worldwide reveals “drastic improvement” over the last fifty, the last one hundred years. To think otherwise is to be far too narrowly focused.
Can we do better? Of course we can. But a little less despair would be a good starting point.
It may be because I did some mental associations between the article and the header image that aren’t there in the substance, but the impression I got from the author is that we aren’t living in the utopian techno-future of flying cars, robot butlers, and 20-hour work weeks that mid-century technologists promised us simply by applying technology as a solution to everything. Again, no one is arguing that technology is bad, or that it hasn’t done anything for anybody. The argument being made is that, because there has been little focus on the human costs of certain technologies, we’ve ended up with a world in which a lot of people at the very low end are certainly doing better than they ever have, but they’ve been pulled up into a world in which inequalities and existing power structures have not been leveled as we were promised, but instead re-entrenched and even amplified by the careless and/or unthinking application of technology in the developed world.
i think this can’t be overstated. people like to say – as several in this thread have – that technology is just a tool. as if any tool is neutral, without cost, and without bias.
we use tools to create change – otherwise why did we create the tool in the first place – and every change we make has consequences. some good, some bad.
i dither.
as i grow older i honestly think the most important aspect about humans is not our tool usage: it’s our compassion.
when it goes awry we create in-groups and out-groups, raise war and conflict; when it goes well we create stories and children; raise gardens or cats ( pick any two. )
in one sense, all of our technology exists to try to make our lives better. not solely because technology is cool – and it is – but because making each others lives better is important.
with all that said, will we race forward full steam and the consequences be damned? probably.
do we have to? not really.
we’re reaching the point where we could satisfy the needs of every person on earth ( certainly we already have more than enough food and more than enough ability to create shelter ) – we just have to organize to do so – but, organizing is difficult, and everybody is slightly more interested in making the next whirlygig than in using our current whirlygigs to get the job done.
No, it is end in itself, one of the most important, which is why it is in the first amendment and not a later one.
Would you rather be dirt poor but have the freedom to criticize anyone and anything, or be rich and but have to keep your opinions to yourself or risk punishment from the powerful?
A lot of people would go either way on that question, and I think which choice they make speaks a great deal about their character.
I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing a lot. Every time I read one of those articles or see one of those news stories about how X technology is hurting society or whatever, I, as someone who likes using a lot of technology, kind of take it personally. It feels like people are saying “You’re a terrible person for using all this internet stuff and contributing to the decline of civilization.” But it’d probably be better to think “The people who make technology should probably change the way they do things so that people don’t perceive their products as leading to the decline of civilization.” If technology were designed to actually improve the well-being of humanity, there wouldn’t be all those articles and news stories criticizing it and people would feel better about using it.
I was at the bottom of that negative dip in 2008, and things are only getting worse.
Being in that negative change bit between 80-85% in a developed country is a struggle. Where I live there are people who go to the foodbank to feed their family despite being in full time work. Children go to school unfed. There are people in full time work who sleep in homeless shelters in London.
Things improving in developing countries is great, no question, but this does not excuse the ignoring and disbelieving of poverty happening in developed countries. This is a problem that needs to be fixed ASAP, because if you leave it for us poor people to fix it you may not like the solution.
