41–50 of 63 posts
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I Live in a Techno-Dystopian Surveillance Nightmare and All I Got Was This Shitty MP3 Player
Sorry you bought a Zune instead of an iPod.
Apparently ( https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-importance-of-Christopher-... ) one of the things that originally got computer scientists interested in Christopher Alexander was the original Whole Earth Catalog promoting his Notes on the Synthesis of Form .
I have never heard of Christopher Alexander (and Quora is unusable). Who is he?
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Social dislocation, a loneliness epidemic, the breakdown of civil society and of trust in the media, gambling unleashed in everyone's pockets, billions of dollars spent trying to get you addicted to scrolling on your phone... Yes, it's worth bemoaning that.
Yeah my mistake you’re right. I’ll go be sad for awhile as penance!
Sure, toys and cheap fun are more accessible than ever, but we are losing something much deeper that makes humans... more human for the lack of better words. Election results in many places are just a result of that. Maybe you don't care about that or are oblivious about it, to your own loss, but its everywhere and everybody who cares sees/feels it. There is gigatons of cool technological progress for sure, but it doesn't counterbalance what was expressed.
I am lucky that I moved to society which offers much more real freedom and democracy than current US can to 99.9% of its citizens (none other than Switzerland), even if for other reasons initially (mountains and obviously money), its what eventually made me stay and much more (polite respectful society which is low crime, high quality public healthcare and education, decent social system and so on). Most of the world has much less and it doesnt seem to be improving.
Apparently ( https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-importance-of-Christopher-... ) one of the things that originally got computer scientists interested in Christopher Alexander was the original Whole Earth Catalog promoting his Notes on the Synthesis of Form .
I have never heard of Christopher Alexander (and Quora is unusable). Who is he?
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You didn't explicitly call your examples major milestones of human progress but you did use rather trite examples of consumer capitalism as a counter example to my disappointment at the lackluster end game of 20th century techno-futurism. As other commenters have stated the techno-futurist vision that comes out of the Whole Earth Catalog was radically utopian and far grander then "I get to watch low value consumer me…
I’d say dirt cheap solar panels and CRISPR based vaccines are pretty cool. I’m also quite optimistic about the proliferation of plausible SMR designs. That new concrete that self heals and sequesters carbon is cool too.
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You didn't explicitly call your examples major milestones of human progress but you did use rather trite examples of consumer capitalism as a counter example to my disappointment at the lackluster end game of 20th century techno-futurism. As other commenters have stated the techno-futurist vision that comes out of the Whole Earth Catalog was radically utopian and far grander then "I get to watch low value consumer me…
I’d say dirt cheap solar panels and CRISPR based vaccines are pretty cool. I’m also quite optimistic about the proliferation of plausible SMR designs. That new concrete that self heals and sequesters carbon is cool too.
> More peace, no apartheid, no Soviet union, removing borders between countries in Europe, tech felt like a way to connect us.
If I read your comment charitably, one could maybe argue that we're actually making decent progress in the electrification of things, and that we're also improving health globally, but I'm not sure if that's the case. It doesn't quite feel like it at least.
Apparently it's still around at https://www.well.com/
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If you look at the first 10 years of Whole Earth Review, starting in 1985, it's startling to see the similarities to the issues of today. January 1985: Computers as Poison - "It is not our hand that we put into the computer, it is our attention." July 1985: Digital Retouching - "The end of photography as evidence of anything" Winter 1985: "Islam: Beyond the Stereotypes" Spring 1986: "Peering into the age of Transpare…
Whole Earth published a whole spectrum of ideas, so you can cherry pick and find things that were prescient of the trouble we would find ourselves in. But overall the publication held a very optimistic view that stands at odds with present day reality.
I love the Whole Earth Catalog. That era of techno-utopian optimism is so exciting. I'm too young to have experienced more then the tail end of it in the 90s going to computer camp as a kid, but it felt like anything was possible and everything was connected. It is a bit sad to see where we have landed after all that.
> It is a bit sad to see where we have landed after all that. For a comically small amount of money I can listen to any song I want to, read any book I want to, watch any movie/TV show I want to. Then there’s the ad-supported videos and images and text. Then there’s the AIs that I use every day! I’m in awe at how amazing where we have landed at is. Sure some stuff isn’t perfect but what fun is it to be sad about what…