>Technology destroys people. We’re already cyborgs (pacemakers, hearing aids) of a sort, and are well on our way to the type of Big Brother dystopia of the techno-utopians<p>This one cuts quite close to the bone and I find this comment quite shortsighted and in poor taste.<p>My mother's life was saved by some extremely swift handling by medical professionals and (here it comes) technology. Where I'm from, if someone has a heart attack everyone in the vicinity who is trained gets a text message with the location and/or situation.<p>By sheer luck one of these people was in the neighbourhood and got a text message. By another stupidly lucky coincidence this woman had a defibrillator at home, which was nearby. She ran to her home, got the machine, and ran to our home and tried to restore my mother's heartbeat.<p>I don't know the details but my mother was saved by technology that day and she's been living roughly 10 years now with a little machine next to her heart. Every time her heart beats in an irregular fashion the machine gives a little zap (which hurts, a lot) and restores the beat. Luckily, this happens rarely, but still.<p>I'm not sure where I am going with this rant, but someone very dear to me was saved by technology, and i'd take the cyborg life over being dead.
> but slowness only became a bad thing when time became money.<p>This. After downscaling my expenses and started working at 25-50% it's amazing how much time I got now compared to working full time. We really under value time and have a weird perspective on it and what we can use it for. Walking to the shop can take 45 minutes for me now which seem ridiculous for some when a car ride takes 5-10 minutes. But what is not accounted for is that slowness itself has value, I have time for reflection while walking, I get fresh air and move my body, I don't need to worry about a car and its costs. The same goes for food. I used to do alot of take outs when I worked full time but now I don't hesitate to prepare and cook for 2-3 hours, I get a much more intimate experience with food, I learn things and get to eat food that taste great.
Why stop there? I don’t think Native Americans lived in log cabins. Antibiotics and modern medicine should undoubtedly be cast to the trash heap as well. I can’t help but feel like simply limiting screen time is the solution here...
I wrote something like this last year <a href="https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2017/2/13/i-miss-the-20th-century" rel="nofollow">https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2017/2/13/i-miss-th...</a><p>I miss the face to face interactions, I miss community, I miss boredom and a considerably simpler life. At the same time though I love that I have friends all over the world, many of which I've never met, but know just as well as local friends. I love that I can go on YouTube and see all sorts of amazing and interesting things. I love that I can share and discuss ideas with strangers on BBS/forums/sites like HN and Reddit. I love that an an adapter from Automatic tells my phone data from my car that then gets pushed to various places via IFTTT so that I can create a record of all of my driving and vehicle diagnostic alerts for potential use in the future.<p>As I said in my blog post I have my foot in both worlds, being born in the mid 80's I was there for the birth of the modern internet and still had several years of my life where I didn't even know the internet existed. Now the internet is effectively an augmentation to my own person.
I think his heart is in the right place, but the execution is over-reactive.<p>Here are my ideas that I want to implement for myself:
1. Move back to dumb phones, landlines, or a wifi phone.
2. Limit movie/video consumption to a fixed time limit per day. For example, 1 hour a day.
3. Re-use old technology/re-cycle technology waste before buying new.
4. Move back to bare metal servers, and self-host.
5. Use simpler technologies that have no environmental impact.
6. Only invest in technology that is repairable and long-lasting.
> <i>(I’ve never found doing the work to buy and maintain them particularly convenient).</i><p>They ain't called conveniences because they're convenient to purchase and maintain. They're called conveniences because they're more convenient than beating your clothes with rocks down at the river, and more convenient than skinning a rabbit and turning it over a spit.<p>Anyway, he seems to have thought all this out. I'm glad he's doing this, and I'm glad he's not presenting it as a solution for everyone.
There should be a middle way between this and our current lifestyle. Eschewing all technology also means eschewing the positive things technology provides to us.
What if he gets sick? Will he refuse modern medicine too and turn to traditional ones? Because if he accepts modern medicine, then he does use modern technology, that is, its results, so he still relies on other people working on technology which modern science uses a lot.<p>So he enjoys the benefits without sharing the costs.
Without technology I'd be 100% deaf and effectively locked out of the cutting edge of the working world given the added friction of communicating.<p>Without technology, I'd be paralyzed or dead as I required 15 major surgeries in my childhood to stabilize a [unnamed condition]. (It bears saying - worth it. It was hell, but it was worth it.)<p>Without technology, I'd be blind, and again - have a much higher chance of being locked out of the ability to sustain myself financially, not to mention be robbed of my love of design / illustration.<p>Without technology, there would be a great deal less souls on this earth - (more than I think most would realize since we don't typically care to flaunt our reliance on technology.)<p>---<p>Ironically, I'm also as "minimal technology" as they come - still use a dumb phone out of privacy and notification concerns, will never buy a voice assistant, am only on the social networks that my job demands, et cetera. Acknowledging that tech does wonders certainly does not mean you have to be blind to the horrors that it's equally capable of, or that you're defenseless against it.<p>I am ... very tired of having to defend a part of my existence from statements like these, where more compassionate thinking could illuminate a thousand more examples like the above.<p>Very tired.
Interesting opinion piece. I've previously written about the rise of technoskepticism: <a href="http://jcfrei.com/technological-primacy/" rel="nofollow">http://jcfrei.com/technological-primacy/</a>
(2016) . He posts updates to <i>The Guardian</i>, e.g. this one.<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/19/a-year-without-tech-debt-gadgets-reconnect-nature" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/19/a-year...</a>
It feels he is not really wrong on many of his points, but this ain't a solution that he is proposing.<p>Technology is not going away, we need to learn to live with it and have it as a tool to better our lives. It feels that today technology has too much control over people lives. The effects of social media are becoming better understood by the day. Maybe it is time to separete better which technologies are really useful from those that are hardly so.<p>Life is too short to be spent on Instagram (soon deploying it's lite version to many developing countries...)
I have fantasies of similar lifestyle. And to an extent rebooting technology by using simple tools, simpler ways and materials. Maybe just enough to build optics and radio.<p>I agree with him that we're at a point where technology is backfiring. 100 years ago anything was pure improvement. Food conservation, mobility, television. But I feel we're hitting a ceiling.
> Technology destroys people.<p>I'd disagree. Technology is a tool like any other; it may destroy <i>you</i>, but that's anecdotal. It is not a <i>requirement</i> that it destroy people or take them away from what they find important.
I have a new hypothesis I'm terming "sublimation of criticism." This is likely not original since this isn't my field, but here goes.<p>The campaign to exterminate any alternative political discourse in the West has been so successful that it's now very hard to even talk about any alternative to state corporatist capitalism. This system has many downsides and generates many negative externalities and these are clearly visible to many people, but since the system can't be directly criticized people try to pin its shortcomings on other things like "technology" (an absurdly general term) or thrash around chasing conspiracy ghosts. It's a kind of philosophical scapegoating and fantasizing as a substitute for actual directed criticism.<p>In other words the effectively prohibited criticism of the system <i>sublimes</i> into other areas.<p>Maybe state corporatist capitalism destroys people and places. Try that.<p>I wonder if this phenomenon was common in the late USSR?
TL;DR; By "destroys people" he means "destroys their relationship with nature" and causes a sedentary lifestyle which leads to "industrial-scale afflictions of cancer, mental illness, obesity, heart disease, auto-immune disorders and food intolerances".<p>He should probably use technology to look up the actual causes of some of those. As well as observe the fact that lots of people are not sedentary despite their heavy use of technology.