necessary decline in our quality of life
i’m not refuting your core premise.
but on the note of this issue, not sure i can agree.
have a look at this public infrastructure technology from 122 years ago:
imagine if we’d spent the last 1+¼ century collectively working towards the utopia this kind of project hinted at - instead of developing new machines to destroy?
typically they say utopian dreams scatter in the face of increased technological awareness. have to say my experience has been the opposite.
the more i learn about technology, the more i realise we could probably be very close to a near-utopia by now. for some suspicious reason we took a very different road, and here we are.
That was essentially a big part of my point. We could be close to a utopia by now (from the perspective of technological possibilities).
Instead, as I said
That said I don’t currently believe technology itself is inherently bad.
Like all tools, it depends what you do with it.
Is a general purpose tool like hammer good or bad? It has the capacity for both. And therefore it’s up to the user which is which.
And that’s the issue really, what are we doing with our wonderous technology?
This might be a bit of a radical take. But in that ~125 year window i was refering to, alot of machines we’ve invented are actually weapons.
Weapons to destroy eachother physically (conflict/threats of violence etc).
Weapons to destroy nature (deforestation and probably most mining).
Weapons to destroy the mind (social media etc, actually most media now).
What if we’d had 1+¼ century of building a collective utopia instead of all these weapons?
afaict from the technical perspective it’s not really unfeasible, its the non-technical problem: the user and what they use the tools for.
Another clue for us is probably the term appropriate technology, which is a vibe i think eg. solar punk is helping to cultivate.
Anyway we’ve done ALOT of misuse. That’s why i don’t blame technology itself.
I still think it’s more about what we’ve done with it.