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Comment by leashless | Hacker News Reader

"If there was a big red button that turned off the Internet, I would press it without hesitation. Then I would collect every screen in the world and bulldoze the lot down into a deep mineshaft, which I would seal with concrete, and then I would skip away smiling into the sunshine."

I know Paul Kingsnorth from the "Dark Mountain" days -- I worked closely with Dougald Hine on a project (http://collapsonomics.org) before they started Dark Mountain.

The rhetoric is strong, but the realism is not. Next step: let's turn off the electricity.

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Somehow I'm sure he would keep the part of the Internet that allows him to distribute his self-important horsecrock with impunity.

>Next step: let's turn off the electricity.

Why not?

Or an even better question: say electricity is deemed OK to keep. Does that transfer to anything else we have or will build?

Should we ever not develop something, e.g. are there any diminishing returns combined with negative tradeoffs beyond some point?

Or we should develop everything, even a future "government can add telemetry to get all your thoughts and remotely zap you if you had one it doesn't like" device, for example?

"If we have the ability to do something, we must do it, even if we annihilate ourselves in the doing". Such will be said, only unironically instead. It's the core belief of the Cult of Progress that dominates this site, and I am phrasing it that way to hit some nerves, maybe spark a smidge of introspection, though I'm not hopeful on the latter :P

A lack of progress inevitably leads to annihilation anyway.

So might as well go for it.

Called it, took less than a day too.

The Sentinelese and the various uncontacted and/or hunter-gathering tribes still in existence across Australia, sub-Saharan Africa, and South America would tend to disagree with this notion. And barring complete ecological collapse, they'll be here after we're gone :)

Thought experiment. You are confined to one room. You send orders for this to be done and receive confirmation. What has changed?

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