Amusing Ourselves to Death (2009)

There wasn't a time "before we had technology". Best to avoid that line of thinking if you want to escape the determinist (Veblem) trap and end up like Kaczynski.

Postman is an author we enjoy but seldom acknowledge the wider genre into which he fits. It's called "tech critique".

You can study it through the ages, comparing the outlooks and influences of Einstein, Ellul, Freud, Fromm, Heidegger, Illich, Kaczynski, Marcuse, Mumford, Nietzsche, and Postman, as well as sci-fi writers like Wells, Forster, Clarke, Gibson, Le Guin, Dick...It makes a very good companion to a study of the philosophy of science.

Some takeaways (at least ones that stick in my mind):

Technology is inseparable from the human condition, There are no primitivist escapes, noble savages or gardens of Walden.

By the same token there is not and won't ever be any golden age of Utopian technology.

Technology most closely resembles a "drug" in all its manifest functions.

Technology comes with an accumulative maintenance cost.

It is monotonic/directional. There's no easy way back and we can't uninvent stuff.

Minimising the _harms_ of technology while maximising the benefits and maintaining human dignity amidst it is the best we can do.

Even if initially excited by new developments all people are ultimately ambivalent about technology. They fear it, use it begrudgingly and resent their dependency on it. Iron bridges and steam locomotives raised the same questions as GPS and iPhones do today.

Many people romanticise and worship technology. It is a secular God.

If we "love" it, it's the sick love of an addict or the sadomasochistic power glee (tech "dealers" like Ellison, Zuck, and Musk)

A tiny few (that's us) enjoy a curious fascination that makes tech an "end in itself". Those people get used to create a supply for the dealers and addicts.

Anyway you gotta love Postman, if only for exquisite use of "centrifugal bumblepuppy". What he describes in this passage is really the soporific control/domination effects of technology in the hands of tyrants/dealers who delight in the subjugation of attention - which I think is made best by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America.

"I’m having trouble deciding whether I understand the world better now that I’m in my seventies than I did when I was younger, or whether I’m becoming more and more clueless every day. The truth is somewhere in between, I suspect, but that doesn’t make me rest any easier at night. Like others growing old, I had expected that after everything I had lived through and learned in my life, I would attain a state of Olympian calm and would regard the news of the day with amusement, like a clip from a bad old movie I had seen far too many times. It hasn’t happened to me yet. My late father, in the final year of his life, claimed that he finally found that long-sought serenity by no longer reading the papers and watching television. Even then, and I was thirty years younger than he, I knew what he meant. What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day."

https://archive.is/0GZmW

(I haven't managed to stop reading the news unfortunately...)

>>If men learn [to read], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.Plato, 400-300 BC

Basically, learning to read and write would lead to an overreliance and provide only a "semblance of wisdom", rather than "true wisdom".

[0] https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/