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> In terms of human existence tech is overwhelmingly above the average person need. People have been saying this about technology for as long as technology has

• agumonkey 4y ago
  Fair point but there are a few factors: that tool is having a lot of side effects, it went from a mysterious side piece of your life to a central addictive plane. I can't think of any tech that backfired that much. Your computer is underutilized, and its capacity is often above its users intellectually. We never had tools of that kind before, and I'm not sure people will feel the need for more. I personally am completely off the market.
• nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > People have been saying this about technology for as long as technology has existed. Have they? It kinda sounds "truthy" but if ever there was an unfalsifiable claim that's gotta be a contender. I'm no general historian but think for the most-part people have enthused over and coveted technologies for thousands of years. With the exception of occasional religious objections to "magic" it was the Luddites during the industrial revolution whose first stirrings of discontent emerged. Even the early critical science-fiction of H.G Wells and Mary Shelley was tepid and poetic. Much later, in the late 1960s, comes the first modern tech-critique, and much of that is driven by affairs relating to environmental and war problems, Vietnam, oil crisis, DDT... way before the Internet. The idea that we have a surfeit of technological capability, or perhaps just too much of the wrong type, seems very contemporary to me.