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I think you are right, society as a whole will basically have no effect from smartphone Luddites, my main point was that it is just yet another arbitrary rejec

I think you are right, society as a whole will basically have no effect from smartphone Luddites, my main point was that it is just yet another arbitrary rejection of technology, and that the majority of society will adapt to it. The Amish decided that technology developed after 1600 or so was dangerous for humanity and needed to be carefully avoided. None of us agree with that. 200,000 years ago some of our ancestors' relatives were probably terrified of fire. In 400 years the idea that it is somehow dangerous to use whatever they have on whatever their equivalent to our smartphones and tiktok is will seem rediculous to them, just like you disagree with the Amish that it is important to avoid buttons on clothes lest you become a slave to vanity.

em-bee 5y ago
well the danger of depending on technology is that we get stuck when it stops working. i just had this experience today. thanks to covid here it is frequently necessary to have a smartphone with a camera to scan a code at a location that updates your health-status. now i understand the point of contact tracing, but without a phone i would have been denied service. in my case the camera stopped working so i could not scan the code. it was fixed with a reboot of the phone, but imagine if it wasn't. i'd have been stuck. i might not even have been able to buy new phone or get it repaired because those places might not let me in either. our dependency on technology is so absolute and deep that any failure can have serious consequences for an individual. we need that minority that refuses or avoids certain technology as a test for our fallback options. i was also told to pay using the phone, which i would not do either. that was more of a communication issue, the person at the counter asked me to hand her my phone so she could initiate the payment, presumably because she felt that it was to complicated to tell me how to do it. when i refused, she sent me to another counter where i could pay in cash, which effectively caused me to verify that a fallback system that didn't rely on a phone was available and working.

em-bee 5y ago

well the danger of depending on technology is that we get stuck when it stops working. i just had this experience today. thanks to covid here it is frequently necessary to have a smartphone with a camera to scan a code at a location that updates your health-status. now i understand the point of contact tracing, but without a phone i would have been denied service. in my case the camera stopped working so i could not scan the code. it was fixed with a reboot of the phone, but imagine if it wasn't. i'd have been stuck. i might not even have been able to buy new phone or get it repaired because those places might not let me in either. our dependency on technology is so absolute and deep that any failure can have serious consequences for an individual. we need that minority that refuses or avoids certain technology as a test for our fallback options. i was also told to pay using the phone, which i would not do either. that was more of a communication issue, the person at the counter asked me to hand her my phone so she could initiate the payment, presumably because she felt that it was to complicated to tell me how to do it. when i refused, she sent me to another counter where i could pay in cash, which effectively caused me to verify that a fallback system that didn't rely on a phone was available and working.