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Comment by smugengineer69 | Hacker News Reader

Robot apologist here, but for some reason neo-Luddism has become fashionable again and it bothers me. Is this really a war over little pings from email inboxes? Are we truly that oppressed by the ability to find out anything about anything? Do we need a virtual Moses to part the red sea of push notifications? I find it really difficult to sympathize with this line of argument. This is either a case of misconfigured notifications or of honest Amish-like fear of technology, and neither of these make sense to me.

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I envy you; you haven't had your "this is all bullshit" moment yet. It will happen. It's not questioning the value of the technology (as you believe), it's questioning the place in your life.

This isn't "neo-Luddism," this is people questioning whether all of those things are actually important enough to us to warrant a context switch. As I get older, the context switches hurt more and more, and I desire a higher SNR throughout my life. That means less Facebook, less Twitter, and a lot less HN. All push notifications are off on my phone. I wouldn't recommend my system to everyone, but I do derive a tangible benefit from being less connected. (There is also something to be said for keeping the constant, mostly inane chatter of random Internet denizens out of your mind, but it's too early to draw any conclusions there).

Generally, if it happens on the Internet, it probably doesn't matter very much. I'll see it when I need to see it.

Perhaps some of us were wise enough to not fall for the "bullshit"? "It will happen" seems a bit condescending.

Your envy reminds me of an old man wishing he were younger.

It's not that you were wise enough to not fall for the bullshit, but that you have not yet realized that it is bullshit.

The real wisdom comes from the realization that the only reason people are consuming so much information today is because it's a habit that feels like a necessity.

> It's not that you were wise enough to not fall for the bullshit, but that you have not yet realized that it is bullshit.

Are you a mind reader, that you can see what this person does or does not know?

I am disinclined to accept "wisdom" alongside such presumptions.

Attention has limits. Focus, by its nature, excludes.

When scarcity quickly turns to abundance, people take a while to adapt. That's most obvious right now with food; people are learning how to live with a vast surplus of unnaturally delicious things.

The same thing is happening with information. When I was a kid, I was a vacuum cleaner. I read every word on every cereal box, because that was only thing I could find to read at breakfast. My first 300-baud modem was a gateway to miracles. Now there is more text available to me than I will ever finish.

Once abundance forces you to start making choices, you must ask yourself "how much of this do I need?" I don't keep cookies and chips in the house for the same reason I've blocked Facebook on my work machine: I want more than is good for me.

Or, so I can be more specific, remember that we're made out of meat. The meat wants more than the more thoughtful part of me wants. If I want more thoughtfulness, that means less distraction. Fewer blogs, less Facebook, disabling notification sounds and blinks and rumbles. More quiet.

I love technology, but I don't always love what it does to me.

The crystallization moment for me was on walking into the lobby of my university library, with its several million volumes, and realizing that there was no possible way, no how, that I would ever read more than a very small fraction of those works. Followed some time later by the realization that there was no need for me to do so either.

I did explore the library extensively, some portions in depth, others not at all. Our consumption of information is by necessity highly selective. The real key is in who makes the selections.

In an economy of information abundance, most of the information you're presented with is selected for you by someone else, with their own agenda and motivations as for why you should read it.

This is among the most crucial reasons that I care very much about the ability for me to be able to exclude (and occasionally preferentially include) specific information sources. Advertising and marketing in particular.

The Luddites were a labor movement. They opposed what they saw as a system that replaced traditional craftsmanship with unskilled labor. This is a different issue. It's more about spare time than work life. (But now that we spend so much of our spare time doing "work" for companies like Facebook, the lines are blurring...)

What would happen if nobody ever resisted? If nobody did what the Amish do? Is there no value in questioning the trajectory of technology in society? In experimenting with alternative ways of living?

My case is boringly simple. A big part of my life is something I could call "internet addiction." It's not uncommon. You can say it's purely my personal responsibility and so on. Sure. But I'm a real person and I'm affected by technological conditions.

I don't fear technology. But pretty much everything is technology. Looking around me: furniture, cheese graters, toasters, candles, tea pots — it's all technology, no? It all has its purposes. It all shapes my life. The toaster is much simpler than my iPhone. I'm never tempted to sit and play with the toaster past when I should go to bed.

I dunno, I can only write clichés today, but I really don't think it's fair of you to call this "neo-Luddism" a "fashion." It's the way a lot of people who got turned onto tech in their youth are now beginning to perform some kind of resistance. Just because it doesn't resonate with you, because you don't need it, doesn't mean it's stupid or silly.

I think of it more like pollution. The modern world gives us all kinds of amazing things, but there are side effects that are not immediately apparent. London was once infamous for it's "fog" until they started implementing pollution controls. It was just there. (Not that I advocate anything like a top-down diktat re: technology.)

You clearly are self-aware of the impact when it comes to things like push notifications, but many aren't, or at least not until the trickle hits tsunami levels.

Nicely put! I assume everyone here loves the role of technology in our lives...but that didn't stop me downloading LeechBlock the other day minimize my distractions.

I would not describe the Amish relationship with technology as "fear". It's not emotional; it's very reasoned and deliberate. Modern shop tools are common in Amish villages, but anything that connects with mass media is rejected, as is easy transportation. The idea is that they want to keep people connected to the local (self-reliant) community and make it difficult to connect to outsiders. It's reasoning we on HN don't agree with, but it's definitely reason rather than emotion.

Much of the "war over little pings from inboxes" strikes me as similarly deliberate. It's not a fear of technology, it's just a recognition of certain consequences we wish to avoid -- excessive distraction, possibly even addiction. So we reason about which technologies are really worthwhile, and reject the ones with too much downside.

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