I understand your feeling, I know it very well. But that isn't a choice. There is no way to "stop technology". Humanity has always been about technology, from the moment we started picking up sticks.
All we can really do is make sure that technology, and knowledge about it, is more evenly distributed, so that central control is more difficult: make sure it isn't seen as kind of magic to people that they deem is impossible to understand and out of reach to them. Technology is simply a set of tools and should be regarded as such.
Centralized technologies with easily controlled, single points of failure are by far the most dangerous, and the most attractive for oppression. This is why DRM, for example, is really bad. It lives by obfuscation and being hard and/or undesirable to understand.
Also: the tech industry needs to grow up out of the prevalent libertarian attitude[1]. There's a lot of knee-jerk reaction against government action but because that's a fantasy, it usually becomes an excuse for doing nothing at all. As a community we spend far too much time protesting inevitable tends when we should be calling for reasonable, workable regulation – e.g. we're never going to have a world without your personal information being collected in various places (this is the tech-libertarian equivalent of the belief record company executives have about DRM) but as a community we could make significant improvements for security, independent oversight, liability for loss & errors, etc.
1. I would suggest the term “glibertarian” because a significant majority of people who talk about libertarianism do so without demonstrating awareness of how much government support their current lifestyle and success requires.
Unfortunately technology's progression via marketing has turned it into a king of magic that is impossible to understand and is out of reach of them (past consumption). Look at most consumer IT products these days - black boxes for milking people.
DRM, the cloud, closed source software, unified communications (commercial and government internet control) and surveillance already are enslaving us.
I don't agree with you. The problem with IT technology is that it's connected. It is (evenly) distributed, but connected. This gives people who want bad a much wider perspective.
Centralized technologies are not dangerous because they can be easily broken by revolutions. That's why DRM does not work. It's being hacked all the time.
And ofcrouse you always have a choice. You can put down the stick, or disconnect. But the choice is becoming harder as we rely (too) much on technology.
The same "technology" that enables us to develop antibiotics so we can live also creates the biological threats that can massacre us during conflicts. Every knife cuts both ways.
Technology just magnifies the power of a person, so in saying that you would rather have no technology, are you not also implying that people who's incentives you dislike, already have more power in the world than the rest?
Technology doesn't cause these problems, it magnifies them.
Pragmatically speaking, technology causes new problems. You might say it's already a problem that there exist crazy people who want to destroy the world, but really this is not a substantial issue nor one that is tractable to solve. So if there were a piece of new technology that meant that everyone had the power to destroy the world, that would for practical purposes be a new problem.
There is an established, reasonable position (e.g. Watchmen) that it is bad to increase the power of individuals, because when large power can only be wielded by large societies this limits the damage it can do, compared to the same power in the hands of a single individual.
Technology makes certain kinds of oppression (and means of gaining and keeping power) easier or possible at all, and makes certain other kinds harder or impossible.
wladimir|13 years ago
All we can really do is make sure that technology, and knowledge about it, is more evenly distributed, so that central control is more difficult: make sure it isn't seen as kind of magic to people that they deem is impossible to understand and out of reach to them. Technology is simply a set of tools and should be regarded as such.
Centralized technologies with easily controlled, single points of failure are by far the most dangerous, and the most attractive for oppression. This is why DRM, for example, is really bad. It lives by obfuscation and being hard and/or undesirable to understand.
acdha|13 years ago
1. I would suggest the term “glibertarian” because a significant majority of people who talk about libertarianism do so without demonstrating awareness of how much government support their current lifestyle and success requires.
hp50g|13 years ago
DRM, the cloud, closed source software, unified communications (commercial and government internet control) and surveillance already are enslaving us.
ohwp|13 years ago
Centralized technologies are not dangerous because they can be easily broken by revolutions. That's why DRM does not work. It's being hacked all the time.
And ofcrouse you always have a choice. You can put down the stick, or disconnect. But the choice is becoming harder as we rely (too) much on technology.
mikecane|13 years ago
ZirconCode|13 years ago
Technology doesn't cause these problems, it magnifies them.
lmm|13 years ago
There is an established, reasonable position (e.g. Watchmen) that it is bad to increase the power of individuals, because when large power can only be wielded by large societies this limits the damage it can do, compared to the same power in the hands of a single individual.
eru|13 years ago
Technology does more than simple magnification.
hp50g|13 years ago
I'd say magnify is the wrong term. It empowers people who have disingenuous motives.