7 ms·

I'd say it's more about autonomy, self-sufficiency and freedom, rather than just "living primitive lives". Technological progress tends to stifle all of the abo

by spurgu 3y ago

I'd say it's more about autonomy, self-sufficiency and freedom, rather than just "living primitive lives". Technological progress tends to stifle all of the above, in the grand scheme of things. Think about owning horses back in the day, which you could simply breed to get more of. You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required. Compare that to a car which is manufactured somewhere far away with tons of special expertise and which basically cannot be repaired by a layman anymore (as opposed to not too many decades ago). And you rely on a huge infrastructure network for building and maintaining the roads. There are probably better examples (horses just came to mind). We tend to choose the more "advanced" option because it seems more convenient, without considering the externalities of that convenience, whether that's pollution or handing over part of our self-sufficiency in order to do so. Something like a Carrington event would cripple us and cause utter chaos. Just think of the huge amount of technology that we rely on in daily life and it's not changing direction. At all. We are not becoming more resilient, we're becoming less. We are quickly losing the skills required to adapt to a "lower" level of technology, meaning any quick disruption in the system could be catastrophical. Technology can potentially enable us to have more freedom, autonomy and self-sufficiency, but for it to be sustainable it would need to be at the top of the decision-making tree. Right now it's mostly a balancing act between convenience and affordability on behalf of consumers and profitability of producers. And well, mix in some environmental concerns (but those tend to be secondary as well as almost always reactionary). And yes I'm probably somewhat of a neo-luddite. I take pride in being self-sufficient, to the extent possible. And I'm more than willing to sacrifice convenience for freedom. Technology creates more boundaries, rules and bureaucracy, not less. Technology controls us, rather than the other way around.

ip26 3y ago
Living hand-to-mouth in the bush offers certain kinds of autonomy and freedom, but lacks others. Your stomach is not a lenient master.
notjulianjaynes 3y ago
>Think about owning horses back in the day, which you could simply breed to get more of. You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required. Compare that to a car which is manufactured somewhere far away with tons of special expertise and which basically cannot be repaired by a layman anymore (as opposed to not too many decades ago). And you rely on a huge infrastructure network for building and maintaining the roads. How about the externalities and technological advancements nessecary to domesticate wild horses, and also the infastructure networks which drove the need and ability to create a ship capable of transporting those horses across the Atlantic ocean to America, where they are not a native species.
- spurgu 3y ago
  > How about the externalities and technological advancements nessecary to domesticate wild horses, and also the infastructure networks which drove the need and ability to create a ship capable of transporting those horses across the Atlantic ocean to America, where they are not a native species. Would've been easier had your example played out 10k years ago when there were still native horses in America. :) For domesticating horses, it doesn't rely on huge factories. You need basic tools (stone would suffice) to cut down some trees in order to create an enclosure where you train the horses. Then basic tech like cloth and rope making, and/or leather, for making saddles and bridles etc. Nothing a couple of people can't cobble together with basic knowledge. No reliance on huge complicated factories and supply chains or tech unobtainable by resourceful people, locally. For ships we've been building various boats for ages, with very simple tools. Building a small boat is something a single person can do in weeks to years depending on the size. And larger ones is mostly a question of adding more laborers (engineering calculations and considerations get more complicated with size so there are practical limits built in). Making iron helps in both cases. That doesn't require a ton of technology either but granted it's quite difficult to bootstrap. Still, once up and running doesn't take more than a small community to maintain. Ideally, in my mind, any "acceptable" tech should be manageable by a community of 150 people or less. I keep coming back to the Dunbar number whenever I think of human systems/societies. Your questioning bring up an interesting comparison point: Wood as building material vs. plastics. Wood being 100% recyclable plus it literally grows on trees, while plastics require immense knowledge and expertise in chemistry and raw materials include fossil fuels. The externalities for the latter are huge and will thus require an immense amount of interconnected people and technologies to create and maintain. Way more than 150. I do also realize that there are edge cases where distinctions become difficult, but that's the case with everything. The main idea here is that I think technology should be judged on a spectrum of self-reliance/freedom. Defining a hard limit in the middle can be difficult (or impossible). Although, not impossible or necessarily even hard if the community of people deciding where the limit is is small enough.
bbor 3y ago
> Think about owning horses back in the day, which you could simply breed to get more of. You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required. Ok A) I don’t know much about the past but I’m pretty sure trying to travel unmapped backcountry terrain was super dangerous and hard and slow, horse or no, unless you were in the Great Plains or smtn. B) saying that all it takes to get horses is “simply breed some” is like saying all you need to get a car is “simply build one”. Do you think the untold millions who died (and continue to die) of starvation in subsistence-farming based society were just dumb? It’s hard, dangerous, luck-driven work, assuming you don’t get killed by animals or other humans. > We are quickly losing the skills required to adapt to a "lower" level of technology, meaning any quick disruption in the system could be catastrophical. Disregarding the fact that modern population densities in most of the western world would make subsistence farming impossible, why is self-sufficiency an unquestioned virtue, so much so it gets to be up there with heavyweights like Autonomy and Freedom? To illustrate my concerns more explicitly: If I invented a machine that could make any material or object appear instantly, would you destroy it, under the logic that it’s better to remember how to struggle? Or more near term, are you strongly against the prospect of interstellar travel?
- spurgu 3y ago
  I thought I clearly stated that people tend to choose out of convenience, just like you're pointing out: > I don’t know much about the past but I’m pretty sure trying to travel unmapped backcountry terrain was super dangerous and hard and slow I never said it would be faster or easier. > saying that all it takes to get horses is “simply breed some” is like saying all you need to get a car is “simply build one”. Yes! And you cannot build a modern car. You could, say, in 1940 (probably over quite a wide range of decades), but try building one now and getting it road-legal. You are arguing my point. > Disregarding the fact that modern population densities in most of the western world would make subsistence farming impossible I don't want to disregard that since you are yet again furthering my point. :) Our blind quest at throwing technological solutions at problems have lead us past this irreversible point (among many others). Money and greed made farming into huge corporations and technology (fertilizers made using fossil fuels) was one of the main tools to achieve that. To grow beyond the point of self-reliance. This is why the realization of this tends to lead to the necessity of some kind of destruction - downscaling has simply gotten (seemingly) too difficult. > why is self-sufficiency an unquestioned virtue, so much so it gets to be up there with heavyweights like Autonomy and Freedom? I had a paragraph that I edited out in the end about many people not caring about self-sufficiency - many naturally gravitate towards relying on others. I thought I loosely covered this in the end paragraph by mentioning that I take pride in self-sufficiency, as did Kaczynski. But also it becomes a basic incredient when you expand the scope of systems to small communities of people, rather than just one or a family. Or larger. But! The important idea is that the smaller the community of self-sufficiency is, the more resilience it has. > To illustrate my concerns more explicitly: If I invented a machine that could make any material or object appear instantly, would you destroy it, under the logic that it’s better to remember how to struggle? To assess the values and virtues of technology I think it should be judged in terms of characteristics like: - can I create it myself (tools, raw materials, licensing) - can I repair it myself? - what's the life-cycle and if not practically infinite (Ship of Theseus) how much of it can be recycled/reused/repurposed? - etc. So if your material synthesizer relies on a proprietary miniature fusion-reactor with the proprietary tech owned by a multinational conglomerate where, once humanity has grown to rely on the device will effectively be enslaved by it, I don't think it's that great of an idea (although the tech by itself sounds awesome). I wouldn't destroy it, but I think it'd be a terrible idea to adopt it worldwide. If however it was powered by open-source tech, where any reasonably equipped small factory can produce spare parts for it, that sould like it could be quite a revolutionary thing! > Or more near term, are you strongly against the prospect of interstellar travel? Not sure how this is more near-term but no, I have nothing against interstellar travel, that seems like the obvious thing for any life form to do - to try to propagate outwards/further as much as possible. However! All life forms also tend to respect the boundaries in the environment and find an equilibrium. Animals tend to stay where there are resources available to sustain them. The problem with humans is that we, using our large brains and us-vs-them views, use technology to expand at the expense of everything else. If we were to solve this conundrum and find a happy balance, we might not even want to venture out to the stars (for much more than redundancy purposes as a species). Our planet is quite an incredible place, as is our minds. If we'd started looking more inwards we might find that we don't need to perpetually evolve external things in order to be happy.
sph 3y ago
I agree with your entire comment, as another neo-luddite, but take exception with: > Technology creates more boundaries, rules and bureaucracy, not less. Technology controls us, rather than the other way around. Technology how it's wielded today, by lobbyists and government, controls and rules over us. But technology is a tool, and there is an unexplored problem space of using technology not to separate us from nature into rigid control structures, but to enhance our lives, to actually let us live longer, in harmony with nature. Technology is neutral, but has mostly been used against us and this is becoming unsustainable and unacceptable.
- spurgu 3y ago
  Good distinction, agreed.
inglor_cz 3y ago
" You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required." Nope, only in steppe-like environments, where horses are native. If anything, technical civilization tends to de-fragment environments worldwide. You can drive the same car in Patagonia or Borneo as long as the road is there, and your phone will use the same stack of communication protocols. Of course, it has externalities. The question is how these externalities can be mitigated. But a humanity numbering 8 billion people can't realistically think of individual self-sufficiency at a scale, and not even tribes of hunters and gatherers, 1000x less numerous, were ever composed of self-sufficient individuals. We might be more fragile than our ancestors, but we also gained some other forms of resiliency that they didn't have. Humanity actually passed through a bottleneck event about 70 thousand years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory#:~:text=Genetic%20bottleneck%20hypothesis-,Genetic%20bottleneck%20in%20humans,eruption%20on%20the%20global%20climate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory#:~:tex.... It would be a lot harder for a single natural disaster to threaten survival of the entire Homo sapiens species today.
- spurgu 3y ago
  Yeah but you're bringing up a kind of chicken/egg problem, where if we had thought about this properly from the beginning we wouldn't have ended up in a situation where we are now slaves to the technology, as in not having enough farm land for everyone without industrial fertilizers relying on fossil fuels, or not surviving without the car/truck infrastructure like you mention. The initial adoption of those technologies should've been discussed and decided through a different lens rather than through convenience and monetary profits. And now that we're past the point, any solution would involve destruction of some sort. That's a large conundrum.

by spurgu 3y ago

ip26 3y ago

Living hand-to-mouth in the bush offers certain kinds of autonomy and freedom, but lacks others. Your stomach is not a lenient master.

notjulianjaynes 3y ago

>Think about owning horses back in the day, which you could simply breed to get more of. You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required. Compare that to a car which is manufactured somewhere far away with tons of special expertise and which basically cannot be repaired by a layman anymore (as opposed to not too many decades ago). And you rely on a huge infrastructure network for building and maintaining the roads. How about the externalities and technological advancements nessecary to domesticate wild horses, and also the infastructure networks which drove the need and ability to create a ship capable of transporting those horses across the Atlantic ocean to America, where they are not a native species.

spurgu 3y ago
> How about the externalities and technological advancements nessecary to domesticate wild horses, and also the infastructure networks which drove the need and ability to create a ship capable of transporting those horses across the Atlantic ocean to America, where they are not a native species. Would've been easier had your example played out 10k years ago when there were still native horses in America. :) For domesticating horses, it doesn't rely on huge factories. You need basic tools (stone would suffice) to cut down some trees in order to create an enclosure where you train the horses. Then basic tech like cloth and rope making, and/or leather, for making saddles and bridles etc. Nothing a couple of people can't cobble together with basic knowledge. No reliance on huge complicated factories and supply chains or tech unobtainable by resourceful people, locally. For ships we've been building various boats for ages, with very simple tools. Building a small boat is something a single person can do in weeks to years depending on the size. And larger ones is mostly a question of adding more laborers (engineering calculations and considerations get more complicated with size so there are practical limits built in). Making iron helps in both cases. That doesn't require a ton of technology either but granted it's quite difficult to bootstrap. Still, once up and running doesn't take more than a small community to maintain. Ideally, in my mind, any "acceptable" tech should be manageable by a community of 150 people or less. I keep coming back to the Dunbar number whenever I think of human systems/societies. Your questioning bring up an interesting comparison point: Wood as building material vs. plastics. Wood being 100% recyclable plus it literally grows on trees, while plastics require immense knowledge and expertise in chemistry and raw materials include fossil fuels. The externalities for the latter are huge and will thus require an immense amount of interconnected people and technologies to create and maintain. Way more than 150. I do also realize that there are edge cases where distinctions become difficult, but that's the case with everything. The main idea here is that I think technology should be judged on a spectrum of self-reliance/freedom. Defining a hard limit in the middle can be difficult (or impossible). Although, not impossible or necessarily even hard if the community of people deciding where the limit is is small enough.

bbor 3y ago

> Think about owning horses back in the day, which you could simply breed to get more of. You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required. Ok A) I don’t know much about the past but I’m pretty sure trying to travel unmapped backcountry terrain was super dangerous and hard and slow, horse or no, unless you were in the Great Plains or smtn. B) saying that all it takes to get horses is “simply breed some” is like saying all you need to get a car is “simply build one”. Do you think the untold millions who died (and continue to die) of starvation in subsistence-farming based society were just dumb? It’s hard, dangerous, luck-driven work, assuming you don’t get killed by animals or other humans. > We are quickly losing the skills required to adapt to a "lower" level of technology, meaning any quick disruption in the system could be catastrophical. Disregarding the fact that modern population densities in most of the western world would make subsistence farming impossible, why is self-sufficiency an unquestioned virtue, so much so it gets to be up there with heavyweights like Autonomy and Freedom? To illustrate my concerns more explicitly: If I invented a machine that could make any material or object appear instantly, would you destroy it, under the logic that it’s better to remember how to struggle? Or more near term, are you strongly against the prospect of interstellar travel?

spurgu 3y ago
I thought I clearly stated that people tend to choose out of convenience, just like you're pointing out: > I don’t know much about the past but I’m pretty sure trying to travel unmapped backcountry terrain was super dangerous and hard and slow I never said it would be faster or easier. > saying that all it takes to get horses is “simply breed some” is like saying all you need to get a car is “simply build one”. Yes! And you cannot build a modern car. You could, say, in 1940 (probably over quite a wide range of decades), but try building one now and getting it road-legal. You are arguing my point. > Disregarding the fact that modern population densities in most of the western world would make subsistence farming impossible I don't want to disregard that since you are yet again furthering my point. :) Our blind quest at throwing technological solutions at problems have lead us past this irreversible point (among many others). Money and greed made farming into huge corporations and technology (fertilizers made using fossil fuels) was one of the main tools to achieve that. To grow beyond the point of self-reliance. This is why the realization of this tends to lead to the necessity of some kind of destruction - downscaling has simply gotten (seemingly) too difficult. > why is self-sufficiency an unquestioned virtue, so much so it gets to be up there with heavyweights like Autonomy and Freedom? I had a paragraph that I edited out in the end about many people not caring about self-sufficiency - many naturally gravitate towards relying on others. I thought I loosely covered this in the end paragraph by mentioning that I take pride in self-sufficiency, as did Kaczynski. But also it becomes a basic incredient when you expand the scope of systems to small communities of people, rather than just one or a family. Or larger. But! The important idea is that the smaller the community of self-sufficiency is, the more resilience it has. > To illustrate my concerns more explicitly: If I invented a machine that could make any material or object appear instantly, would you destroy it, under the logic that it’s better to remember how to struggle? To assess the values and virtues of technology I think it should be judged in terms of characteristics like: - can I create it myself (tools, raw materials, licensing) - can I repair it myself? - what's the life-cycle and if not practically infinite (Ship of Theseus) how much of it can be recycled/reused/repurposed? - etc. So if your material synthesizer relies on a proprietary miniature fusion-reactor with the proprietary tech owned by a multinational conglomerate where, once humanity has grown to rely on the device will effectively be enslaved by it, I don't think it's that great of an idea (although the tech by itself sounds awesome). I wouldn't destroy it, but I think it'd be a terrible idea to adopt it worldwide. If however it was powered by open-source tech, where any reasonably equipped small factory can produce spare parts for it, that sould like it could be quite a revolutionary thing! > Or more near term, are you strongly against the prospect of interstellar travel? Not sure how this is more near-term but no, I have nothing against interstellar travel, that seems like the obvious thing for any life form to do - to try to propagate outwards/further as much as possible. However! All life forms also tend to respect the boundaries in the environment and find an equilibrium. Animals tend to stay where there are resources available to sustain them. The problem with humans is that we, using our large brains and us-vs-them views, use technology to expand at the expense of everything else. If we were to solve this conundrum and find a happy balance, we might not even want to venture out to the stars (for much more than redundancy purposes as a species). Our planet is quite an incredible place, as is our minds. If we'd started looking more inwards we might find that we don't need to perpetually evolve external things in order to be happy.

sph 3y ago

I agree with your entire comment, as another neo-luddite, but take exception with: > Technology creates more boundaries, rules and bureaucracy, not less. Technology controls us, rather than the other way around. Technology how it's wielded today, by lobbyists and government, controls and rules over us. But technology is a tool, and there is an unexplored problem space of using technology not to separate us from nature into rigid control structures, but to enhance our lives, to actually let us live longer, in harmony with nature. Technology is neutral, but has mostly been used against us and this is becoming unsustainable and unacceptable.

spurgu 3y ago
Good distinction, agreed.

inglor_cz 3y ago

" You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required." Nope, only in steppe-like environments, where horses are native. If anything, technical civilization tends to de-fragment environments worldwide. You can drive the same car in Patagonia or Borneo as long as the road is there, and your phone will use the same stack of communication protocols. Of course, it has externalities. The question is how these externalities can be mitigated. But a humanity numbering 8 billion people can't realistically think of individual self-sufficiency at a scale, and not even tribes of hunters and gatherers, 1000x less numerous, were ever composed of self-sufficient individuals. We might be more fragile than our ancestors, but we also gained some other forms of resiliency that they didn't have. Humanity actually passed through a bottleneck event about 70 thousand years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory#:~:text=Genetic%20bottleneck%20hypothesis-,Genetic%20bottleneck%20in%20humans,eruption%20on%20the%20global%20climate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory#:~:tex.... It would be a lot harder for a single natural disaster to threaten survival of the entire Homo sapiens species today.

spurgu 3y ago
Yeah but you're bringing up a kind of chicken/egg problem, where if we had thought about this properly from the beginning we wouldn't have ended up in a situation where we are now slaves to the technology, as in not having enough farm land for everyone without industrial fertilizers relying on fossil fuels, or not surviving without the car/truck infrastructure like you mention. The initial adoption of those technologies should've been discussed and decided through a different lens rather than through convenience and monetary profits. And now that we're past the point, any solution would involve destruction of some sort. That's a large conundrum.