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Comment by moffkalast | Hacker News Reader

I don't suppose anyone has a short summary?

"Technology bad."

It's really that. He falls for the same trap many modern critics of progress do: the nostalgia for a world that never existed, when men lived meaningful lives in peaceful harmony with nature... juxtaposed with all the purported moral, societal, and environmental decay of today.

Many people find it alluring today, but the themes are evergreen. They crop up in ancient Greece, in the Middle Ages, and throughout history.

Misplaced nostalgia aside, another problem with most such ideologies is that the prescription for returning to that utopian bygone era inevitably involves force: the premise is that our minds are too corrupted to understand what's right. Whether that's blowing things up or taking away your rights is just an implementation detail.

>He falls for the same trap many modern critics of progress do: the nostalgia for a world that never existed

There's the opposite problem most have: the inability to understand that there are people who have actually experienced the past (within their lives) and might prefer it for reasons other than the cliche "they were young then, that's why they like it" compared to the present.

And that, depending on your inclinations and ideas about how to live, it's not true that nothing better "ever existed".

>is that the prescription for returning to that utopian bygone era inevitably involves force: the premise is that our minds are too corrupted to understand what's right

Well, the future comes at people with force too. People thrown out of employment into poverty because of technology and being told "just learn to code" for example.

Or things getting integrated with the state and business world, and becoming increasingly necessary to have, even if you don't want them.

I’ve mentioned before and there was a thread yesterday about a modern Usenet which I think falls into this line of thinking. In the early 90s there was an egalitarian messaging system that wasn’t actively and continuously abused. I would love to be able to be in a world like that, however, that world can’t exist again (at least not in the way it did).

As the saying goes, the only constant is change.

If your ideas of how to live include less childhood mortality, and long and healthy lives, then I doubt there is a better time than the last hundred years (except probably the next hundred years).

Everyone alive has only been in a modern time. Now what characteristics you want your world to have, certainly many people are fighting for different visions. The idea that a particular balance of corporate and legislative power is inevitable is just the messaging from those corporate powers. And it isn’t more than PR - when society gets unbalanced enough, you get changes even if most think it is impossible. Anything from the French Revolution to the end of Apartheid.

>If your ideas of how to live include less childhood mortality, and long and healthy lives, then I doubt there is a better time than the last hundred years

And if your ideas of how to live examine other metrics, there are much better times in the past.

Especially since if changes to bring back aspects of the past that were better were taken today, it wouldn't mean we have to give up technologies that improved the mortality rates. How about that, huh?

In fact, even if your ideas of how to live are solely about less childhood mortality and long and healthy lives, you might be better served with a couple decades past:

https://ccf.georgetown.edu/2023/04/26/research-update-u-s-se...

No other metrics really compare to chance my children will die early.And I lived a couple of decades past, and I am happy to still be alive, and looking forward with interest to the next few decades. If you don’t enjoy your time here, consider therapy, biking, a religious community, meditation, and a strong social network.

I do particularly look forward to the highways being dug up and rewilded, while we get around with Cat Buses or blimps or jet packs. I didn’t get the idea you were advocating that we improve what we have; it came across as what we have sucks and we need to go back, back to the closet, back to less power, back to less information, back to the culture of conformity for the powerful and the culture of fear for the oppressed.

Thank you. It’s depressing to find so many people on HN expressing sympathy for the nonsense written in the manifesto.

People should read “Beginning of Infinity” for a strong counter argument.

Sadly, it seems that for one to be taken seriously as a thinker, it takes minimal coherence, median compatibility of ideals with the readers and maximal violence in advertising yourself.

> "Technology bad."

I didn't read it like that, it was more like "I don't want a six lane highway in front of my house", "Oh, you're just against progress and modernism, so shut up", "Ok, maybe I blow your shit up"...

Something that blew my mind long ago was learning the scottish highlands used to be a massive forest. Ancient humans clear cut the entire landscape and it still hasn't recovered. That sort of broke the illusion of there being some forgotten past of arcadian perfection, where we lived in one and balance with nature. Humans have always been humans. Exploitative, expansionist, perfectly willing to destroy our long term prospects for short term gain. At least in modern western societies we have the power to recognize this part of ourselves, and put aside areas like national parks free from our grasping fingers.

That is post-agricultural revolution humanity. Sure it is ancient by the standards of an individual, but it is only a relatively recent and small part of the more than 100 thousand years of human pre-history.

Okay but humans did this in a ton of environments pre-agriculture. The Amazon was a large grassland with patches of forest that tribal peoples shaped into a giant rainforest over time. This is thought to be the case with tons of places in the old world as well. Humans have been doing mega engineering type stuff for at least 20-30000 years

Like the sibling commenter said, this happened during agricultural times. A lot of Europe was deforested during the Middle Ages.

Someone like the Unabomber doesn’t long back to the past of being a Middle Age serf…! Get real.

I think you are forgetting that the "modern society" you are familiar with is not ubiquitous and in our present moment there are many people that lead completely different lives than you. If you are not ignorant of this, then you are supposing that no one in a different circumstance may prefer it and fight for it.

The real summary isn't just technology bad. He claims mankind as evolved is not compatible with the industrial world we have created therefore humanity will never be able to adapt to it. In order to force adaptation he then lists all the ways those in power will attempt to do so from psych drugs to pleasure bribes to gene editing in order to remove this trait of mankind of needing personal power over one's own destiny so we can better adapt to being serfs in the industrial world (his claims, not mine). He lists numerous scenarios where we will be an unrecognizable species in the future serving the machines too, many of them familiar like how medicine will become too complex to understand so reliance on machines to cure us of problems which in turn becomes irresistible to those in power to make us even more dependent on them for survival.

He also is definitely not any kind of primitive man utopia shill, that's why he rants in the beginning against 'green anarchy' type ideology. He is more of an evolutionist saying even if we returned to primitive life before the industrial revolution we would at least still be human and would have to accept all kinds of terrible things that come with primitive life as the alternative is being a spiritless organism serving machines (again his ideology not mine).

reject humanity, return to monke

Edit: In all seriousness, it's been a while since I read it. His general ideas are that technology has been a disaster for humankind because, among other reasons, it's freed up time for us to be preoccupied with unimportant bullshit, to the point that it causes mental problems with people. People start to act out in various ways in resistance of our current state because we 'know' somewhere in our bodies that this existence is meaningless. People without the luxury of free time do not have to preoccupy themselves with this struggle for meaning.

He also goes on at length about how leftists are self-hating people and worship victimhood, and their mentality is partly a product of this existential dilemma.

But these are just a couple of points I took away. It's much more well-written than I could personally attempt to summarize in an internet comment.

There is a section "The Future" which talks about Artificial Intelligence (AI):

The author postulates that if computer scientists develop intelligent machines that can do all things better than humans, all work will be done by machines and no human effort will be necessary.

There are two possibilities: either the machines make all their own decisions without human oversight or human control over the machines is retained.

173. If machines _are_ allowed to make all their own decisions, it is impossible to predict the outcome and the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. The author suggests that society may become so dependent on machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of their decisions, eventually leading to a stage where machines are in effective control and turning them off would amount to suicide.

174. If human control over machines is _retained_, the average person may have control over certain private machines, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite. The elite will have greater control over the masses and because human work will no longer be necessary, the masses will be superfluous.

If computer scientists do not succeed in developing artificial intelligence and human work remains necessary, machines will still take care of simpler tasks resulting in an increasing surplus of human workers at lower levels of ability. Employed workers will face ever-increasing demands and will need more training, ability and conformity. Their tasks will be increasingly specialized and out of touch with the real world.

The author envisions scenarios where machines take over most important work while humans are kept busy with relatively unimportant work in the service industries, which the author finds contemptible.

The author acknowledges that the outlined scenarios do not exhaust all possibilities but indicates that if the industrial-technological system survives the next 40 to 100 years, individuals will be more dependent on large organizations and their physical and mental qualities will be engineered into them.

Technology is creating a new physical and social environment for humans that is radically different from the environments to which natural selection has adapted the human race and humans will either be adjusted to this new environment by being artificially re-engineered or through natural selection.

179. The author concludes that it would be better to dump the whole system and take the consequences.

(That was all summarized by ChatGPT. I have removed concluding sentences from some paragraphs containing deeply pessimistic motives of insubordination, enslavement, and extermination)

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