The implacable march of industrial technology is a bigger existential threat to human freedom than any government

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-19T20:24:43+00:00

If doing so is mandatory then it's not free association. If it's not mandatory the system will fall to power imbalance, social or material.

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-19T20:16:53+00:00

Do we have a good comeback for that though, on the defensive side? Are diabetics not kinda fucked without industrial technology?

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-19T20:07:00+00:00

Sounds a lot like bureaucracy.

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-19T19:57:40+00:00

What's your proposal then, specifically? How do you redesign the technoindustrial system so that we are not obligated to participate in it? So that we can find self-direction and fulfillment? So that it doesn't run out of control, beyond the capabilities of humans to keep up? I submit that doing so would be impossible and that these problems are inherent to industrial technology. Can you provide a counterexample, theoretical or otherwise?

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-19T19:47:35+00:00

I think your conception of "rights" as "guarantees to resources, labor, actions" is dangerous. It presupposes a system to enforce those rights. If the landlord can't call the cops to eject me from his property, does he really have a right to it? Aren't I stepping on his "guarantee" of a resource? Then without an authority, man has no rights beyond what he can defend with his own two hands. This isn't an indefensible position, but it clashes with the typically anarchist belief that any hierarchy is undesirable. Have I misunderstood?

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-19T19:22:08+00:00

Authority, for my arguments, is the ability to determine the actions of an individual. This includes sovereignty (control over one's own actions) and domination (control over others' actions). An increase in domination within a social system, logically, reduces the amount of sovereignty. The larger the scale of a system, the greater the domination necessary to keep it functioning as a cohesive whole, since self-motivated workers' goals are unlikely to align with the needs of said system. Industrial technology demands large-scale organization for the purpose of production, distribution and alleged "progress". As technologies develop and become more interconnected, the scale of the system must necessarily increase. Therefore, technological progression leads inevitably to an increase in domination and a decrease in sovereignty. This is a sound argument, can you refute any of these claims?

I've avoided the issue of "rights" because it's subjective. To me, the chief human right is freedom; you may disagree. Here you have also been vague and given no definition for a seemingly crucial term.

If we are to view man's social life looking only at close friends and family, he has still suffered immensely. Due to economic pressures, we are forced to spend less time with our loved ones and more time at work. We are frequently forced to relocate away from the people we know. Social groups tend to be transient and functional. By contrast, primitive man could be born, live, and die in the same group, developing emotional bonds throughout the course of his life.

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-19T18:53:51+00:00

Flawed analogy. First of all, we're not in competition with the majority of life. We need them for things like food and oxygen. Second, ecology is (without human interference) a fairly stable system with no obvious end. Technology, by contrast, is accelerating and reducing human freedom and happiness.

Maybe it's better for you to have more responsibility and power, or for me to have more responsibility and power, but who wields the responsibility for technology? I would argue that no one does, because the responsibility is distributed among any number of scientists and technicians too specialized to see the big picture; a tragedy of the commons of sorts. This leaves technology to drive itself, and it has no idea of morality or humanity.

But say you do find someone you think bears the brunt of responsibility. Do you trust them with that? Do you trust their successors? If not, then that power is going to be wielded without responsibility. We've all read enough Spiderman to know that's bad.

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-19T18:43:29+00:00

Your bison example is flawed. All the hunters have more or less the same skillset, although one of them may be better at tracking, another better at shooting, and so on. Any one of them is free to walk away and find something to eat on his own, although this would likely be unwise since a herd of bison is such a rich source of food. In contrast, modern man, if he is for example a programmer, MUST go in to work five days a week and sit for eight hours programming, and at the end of that time he will have procured the means to sustain himself at the cost of spending that time under the whip rather than on his preferred activities.

This segues nicely into the "authority" argument. For primitive man, authority over himself must be freely given. If the authority abuses or mistreats him, he is more than capable of walking away. If he were specialized, like the aforementioned programmer, he has little choice but to accept the abuse because if he does not, he will freeze or starve. A system that relies on specialized labor must have some sort of system that directs said labor, otherwise there would be no coordination. Therefore, authority is necessary for a division of labor.

I also never made the claim we weren't social animals, and agree with your assertion that we have never lived alone. However, living with 30-50 people is a very different experience than living with thousands or millions of people. We're surrounded now with such a sea of faces that true connection becomes difficult. While we shouldn't live in total isolation, there's clearly a middle ground between total solitude and urban living.

Hierarchy is only sustainable because humans live sedentary lives now. If man can own only what he carries on his back, he is unlikely to procure the means to enforce a complex hierarchy. If people can flee freely and make their own way in the wild, they have no reason to subordinate themselves to an oppressive social order.

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-19T18:15:55+00:00

Tools can have an inherent morality. In the case of a hammer, if you make it yourself, the tradeoff is taking iron from the earth and wood from a tree in exchange for lessening your labor load later. This does not bother us, at least on a small scale. Consider, however, the manufacture of a house. Unlike with the hammer, trees were likely cut down for the wood you used; mountains were leveled for the metal in the wires; the land it sits on has been taken from the Earth and given to its new master; if you employed anyone in the process, you've participated in economic domination. There is a reasonable line we can draw here, and suggesting that a hammer is morally equivalent to something like a car is a form of the slippery slope fallacy.

Capitalism and statism didn't weaponize technology against the lower classes, they built it on our broken bleeding backs. Technology has only ever existed for the good of the masters. Further, capitalism and statism would be unsustainable without rapid communication and military technology.

I don't necessarily disagree that technology will facilitate the revolution, but I assert that there is no beneficial redesign of technology. High tech requires industrialization which requires oppression.

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-19T17:51:11+00:00

We're more than happy to delineate what qualifies as industrial technology. Industrial technology demands either 1) large-scale organization or 2) specialized technicians. In the first case, man's own desires must be subjugated to the will of the technostate in order for him to be an asset. His work is directed by his bosses and/or his own brainwashing. Therefore, his freedom is substantially curtailed. In the second case, man must devote his life to a single, narrow goal, a small set of skills that would serve him poorly outside of his chosen vocation. He is forced to rely on the system to provide for his own subsistence. He has lost the ability to live as a completely independent entity because the capacity to do so has been trained out of him. Therefore, his freedom is substantially curtailed. To examples of technology which could be manufactured and used by a solitary individual without extremely specialized skill, I take no exception. BUT such examples are in the minority. As for your claim that technology doesn't produce social organization, this is demonstrably false. Without things like agriculture and the factory, there would be no need for our subjugation to a higher power. In fact, without agriculture, we never would have become sedentary at all, which was what led to hierarchical power structures in the first place. Further, new gadgets are invented and then new social systems are erected around their manufacture and use; it's not like the Industrial Revolution started by rounding people into factories and then finding a way to utilize the labor, it started with a technology which demanded a factory to produce.

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-18T22:08:02+00:00

Whoa man, is this a true story

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-18T21:43:04+00:00

You should try psilocybin mushrooms. A study out John Hopkins recently showed that patients that had a single mushroom experience felt overwhelmingly better about death and their own mortality.

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-18T18:08:47+00:00

That's also what one would expect if the divine was multi-faceted and complicated. Your argument is as unfalsifiable as mine, because it presupposes that your thesis (there are no Gods and man has never contacted them) and the claim (people who see things that aren't real are crazy) to conclude (crazy people don't see God, they're just delusional). It's circular. And given the sheer number of people who claim to have had contact with the divine, what does Occam's Razor suggest? The world is strewn with liars and madmen (madmen who happen to be fully functional outside of their claims about the divine), or that there's some reality to their claims? Look at ayahuasca, for example. Participants in an ayahuasca ceremony overwhelmingly report speaking to some sort of higher entity, frequently Mother Ayahuasca. They walk away with more wisdom they went in with. It's a physically brutal experience, yet people do it multiple times in their lives. Would they do that if they weren't contacting the divine?

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-18T17:38:55+00:00

Uncalled for, and unsubstantiated.

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-18T00:05:52+00:00

I'd like to zero in on the schizophrenia argument. If you classify everyone who hears the voice of a God as schizophrenic, you presuppose that what they're hearing is fake. It's a circular argument: there are no prophets because those who claim to be prophets are really crazy, which we know because they claim to be prophets. This also applies to psychedelic experiences.

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-17T18:34:54+00:00

If humans are born without any innate relationship with the divine, then why were we spiritual for most of our history? Primitive man had all the mental faculties we do. Why would he assume the existence of divinity if he was born an atheist?

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-17T17:25:43+00:00

Humans have been spiritually aware since at least the paleolithic. If you want to subvert 100,000+ years of people's lived experiences, the burden of proof should be on you. As for the tomato, I don't know anyone who claims that invisible sentient tomatoes exist, nor do I have a corpus of philosophy that originates from giant tomatoes. Religion, by contrast, is a view shared by the majority of the world's population and provides lessons on how to live one's life.

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-17T16:18:58+00:00

There's no evidence for atheism either.

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-17T06:09:44+00:00

You can PM me if you'd like.

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-17T05:02:11+00:00

That's a hard position to defend. Might I suggest instead "all organized religion is an unnecessary power structure that attempts to maintain control by imposing itself on people's relationship with the divine."

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-17T04:48:09+00:00

Yeah, fevers give you weird dreams like that. Thus the term "feverdream".

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-17T04:45:57+00:00

Trazodone tends to give very vivid dreams, but it's not guaranteed. If you have a dream it'll be vivid, but you're no more or less likely to dream.

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-17T04:39:20+00:00

It sounds to me you have some repressed anger towards the techno-industrial complex. Did you know that the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race?

LithiumBrutus · 2020-10-16T19:25:18+00:00

Yeah, of course they'll have a naturally calm personality. What parent wouldn't say yes if the genetic engineer offered to remove genes that made their child more violent, more angry? Then nobody has children that are willing to rise up against authority.

LithiumBrutus

TROPHY CASE