Comment by wjnc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wjnc | Hacker News Reader

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Why? I see no arguments, only propositions. (I will bring little arguments myself below. Not flaming.)

Technological advancement is in my opinion unrelated to the way current “social” technologies impact “social relations”. Things are not going well, I’d agree. But I can imagine one hundred beautiful features (or historical technological advances) that have improved social relations, trust and general well-being.

Current big tech is dystopian and extraction based, but that’s not the general trend of the last two centuries. In the late ‘90s, early ‘00s I was actually very optimistic about technology and the state of the world (poverty, global village, war, climate).

Antisocial tech has put us back a long way. But that’s not technology general, ‘just’ Google, Apple, Meta and the app-0-sphere being or doing evil by extracting attention in finite time via small machines. The big machines have brought us much. And even then both ways; for good and for bad.

1. Even early computers of the 90s and 00s tended to reduce face-to-face contact. At least a lot of children started to spend more time on the computer than hanging out in real life. (The latter wasn't obliterated, but reduced.)

2. Airline and rapid travel encourages people to move away from friends and family because they can be visited or reuinted on occasion more often.

3. Not sure how you were enthusiastic about the climate – it's been going steadily worse since the use of fossil fuel technology, which in addition makes it harder for people to engage in sustenance farming in many places due to unpredcitability. People have to rely more on industrial farming

4. Industrial farming and large-scale farming puts many family farms out of business, meaing less human dependence on individuals and more on technology.

5. YouTube, etc. brings more knowledge to the world but many tutorials mean people can be more independent and rely on individuals less for their knowledge.

6. Personal cars mean people do not have to rely on each other for a lot of manual labor like hauling stuff, and they now drive instead of walk to the grocery store, which means a lower likelihood of encountering others you know.

7. All communications technologies in general mean less in-person communication, or a greater ability to move away from communities. The internet means less going to the library, etc.

1. time spent in front of screen means you aren't in a face to face interaction with someone, but the same can be said of books. When many people still connected to a local BBS it was another way to get to know people around you and meetups were common.

2 & 6 & 7. access to airlines (and travel in general) was a net positive for meeting new people. Suddenly people could meet and get to know far more people than the handful of folks in the town they grew up in. Travel is probably on the best ways to meet new people and gain relationships and being able to pack up and move to where your new friends/love interests are is a good thing while communication tech lets you keep in touch with people who are in different cities/states/countries and maintain those relationships

3 & 4. People have to depend more on others to do their farming for them, but if you're working the fields you can't be out meeting real people face to face either. You're much more likely to have a social encounter at a grocery store than a grain silo. the hours you aren't spending growing your own food means you have more time to be with the people you love

5. independence is good and learning new skills means going out to new places to practice them or for supplies and equipment where you can meet other people with similar interests. It's the parasocial aspect of youtube that's most harmful.

> 2 & 6 & 7. access to airlines (and travel in general) was a net positive for meeting new people. Suddenly people could meet and get to know far more people than the handful of folks in the town they grew up in.

Debatable because social relationships also become more frivilous.

> 3 & 4. People have to depend more on others to do their farming for them, but if you're working the fields you can't be out meeting real people face to face either.

But at least you can develop closer relationships with fewer people. Again, it's a matter of what place on the spectrum is ideal.

> 5. independence is good and learning new skills means going out to new places to practice them or for supplies and equipment where you can meet other people with similar interests

Independence is good only up to a point. Too much independence is a natural consequence of advancing technology and becomes pathological.

>1. time spent in front of screen means you aren't in a face to face interaction with someone

Even if you are video chatting? I video chat with family and friends all the time to keep in touch over longer distances. I feel technology is helping there a lot.

If there were no video chatting, people would have more incentive to meet in person or not move away as much. Although a small proportion of people will have video chatting over nothing, the GENERAL trend will be more distance between people, even if in SOME cases it means less distance and more meaningful communication.

That's the key also: a small subset of people who benefit in the short-term does not mean that the technology doesn't move things in a worse direction in the long term. After all, the introduction of new technologies like video chatting sometimes just solves problems created by older technologies, possibly leading to a situation of decreasing LOCAL maxima, each of which seems like it is an improvement because it is, after all, a local maximum.

Hmm so it seems technology is empowering the individual to the level of killing society? I mean it in the sense that we came to this development over millennia of social fueled evolution, and now technology allows us to get rid of all this "legacy". I'm only thinking loud here, but it seems conservatism should have a better target with this, or at least more close to reality, instead of only attacking the consequences with magical thinking.

That is true. But the downside is that technology is also at the same time pushing biological life aside, because its development is fundamentally unsustainable. So it also means eventual complete subservience to it without any true freedom.

Thanks for your replies. I understand the worldview. We differ on a few points of view.

Large scale farming releases hands for more specialization. Specialization leads to interdependence and (in my naïveté) peace. ‘We’ did get a very large part of the world out of poverty. That was part of my optimism. And I thought we would reach peak oil faster and go for sustainable faster (batteries are still the major future potential upside for me).

Perhaps in a ‘might have been’-scenario 9/11 and the end of the end of history (Fukuyama), plus the antisocial tech are the turning points. Haven’t thought that shift from techno optimism to political, social and cultural negativity (in me, but it seems a trend as well) through enough. The whole bitcoin shebang, the return of the 80s American Psycho capitalism and consumerism, the wars just rub me the wrong way. I might be turning hippie in my second half of life.

As a child of the 80s I’ve never felt technology reducing social interaction. But that might have been a temporal sweet spot. Massive amounts of screen time, massive amounts of outside time (friends, sports).

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