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Comment by murderberry | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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.

>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.

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.

> "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"...

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