Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents • Hacker News Board

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#161

Post by agentultra » Wed, Aug 23, 2023, 1:58 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #140

marcosdumay wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has any book-burning movement in history actually succeeded in getting ride of the books? Because I don't know of any, they manage to destroy a text here or there, but there were always some compatible texts that survived. AFAIK, we really didn't lose useful knowledge to them. (And let's not forget that today we made life much harder for the book burners.) What really does destroy knowledge is it becoming useless for…

yes, in most cases the maya codices and the khipu were lost in very nearly their entirety, and the more abundant maya hieroglyphs carved on stone have been only partly deciphered. the khipu are entirely undeciphered except for arithmetic of carthaginian literature not one book remains the khwarazmian empire is known from the accounts of its neighbors and destroyers qin shi huang ordered the burning of the history boo…

It was by an incredible amount of luck that Lucretius' On the Nature of Things is still published today. If it wasn't for a group of Florentine hipsters the last copy might have rotted on a shelf in a neglected monastery library. Who knows how the Renaissance might have progressed without it and whether the Enlightenment would have been different.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#162

Post by me_me_me » Wed, Aug 23, 2023, 2:27 PM UTC

daemonologist wrote: post #88

me_me_me wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a coincidence, I had that discussion with my friends yesterday. We came to conclusions that the scenarios of rebuilding society back up are based on the type of collapse. The greater drop (destruction events) and greater time gap before rebuilding can start anew the harder it would get. A dark age collapse - worst case scenario - where people slowly loose knowledge over generations - due to lack of institutions…

A Canticle for Leibowitz comes to mind, though while the preservation of knowledge after collapse is a central premise it is not what the novel is about, exactly. Worth reading in any case.

Sounds like my next book then :)

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#163

Post by lolc » Wed, Aug 23, 2023, 3:17 PM UTC

eternityforest wrote: post #135

Ensorceled wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've always been curious if our society were to collapse would the artifacts left behind indicate to a future society how to reconstruct this technology? Fundamentally, if there is a collapse, future societies have a VERY tough row to hoe ... we've essentially dug up and drilled ALL of the easily available hydrocarbons and moved the bulk of our science and technology to storage that requires that level of science a…

And yet there seems to be shockingly little effort towards making sure that doesn't happen. Why isn't there an underground bombproof chip fab somewhere? It's like as if people don't really care about technological society, they just do what they always do, expand and try to do stuff that is hard and impressive, and if the computers went away... they'd be just as happy as a blacksmith or something... Or maybe even hap…

A modern chip fab needs a supply chain the size of humanity. And you can't bury a reserve humanity in case the regular one goes bust. A buried chip fab would be scrapped for steel.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#164

Post by kragen » Wed, Aug 23, 2023, 3:56 PM UTC

agentultra wrote: post #161

kragen wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, in most cases the maya codices and the khipu were lost in very nearly their entirety, and the more abundant maya hieroglyphs carved on stone have been only partly deciphered. the khipu are entirely undeciphered except for arithmetic of carthaginian literature not one book remains the khwarazmian empire is known from the accounts of its neighbors and destroyers qin shi huang ordered the burning of the history boo…

It was by an incredible amount of luck that Lucretius' On the Nature of Things is still published today. If it wasn't for a group of Florentine hipsters the last copy might have rotted on a shelf in a neglected monastery library. Who knows how the Renaissance might have progressed without it and whether the Enlightenment would have been different.

yes but this wasn't the result of intentional book-burning directed at suppressing epicureanism; though the christians were not really a fan, lucretius wrote too early to directly attack christianity, so it was never banned by the church

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#165

Post by developer93 » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 1:22 PM UTC

chinchilla2020 wrote: post #108

developer93 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a treasure trove, it's just mixed in with a lot of trash. Like panning for gold, you need to know where the good lodes are and recognise it when you see it.

I disagree. I have had no moments of profound discovery or insight from surfing the internet. It has been a useful tool for finding specific knowledge and skills, but I would say that there is no "treasure" on the internet. Any treasure you find will be found through experiences in the real world.

I can say that I've got a much more open mind via conversions I've had with strangers on various platforms over the years. My feminism is much more informed and mature than it would be if I hadn't had access to the differing opinions I've read and discussed over the years for example. I also wouldn't be able to do my job without the internet. When I was just starting out, I learnt perl out of a big thick book (O'Reilly maybe?) and I can say that searching the internet is easier! I'm not saying it's perfect, but you must get some value out of it, or you wouldn't be here in the first place...