The Machine Stops (1909)
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I wonder if humanity could/should have its cake and eat it to. Imagine a world where different communities intentionally live at different technology levels. At the lowest level, you don't have electricity, just man- and animal-power. At the mid-level, you have steam engines and electricity, but no computers. At the high-level you have everything. Ideally one could choose which level to live at, perhaps at the coming-of-age. The nice thing about such a civilization is that it's resiliant to damage - for example, a Carrington event (e.g. massive solar flare) might destroy the high-level civ, damage the medium-level civ, but leave the low-level civ untouched. There might even be instructions/commitment/duty for civs to rebuild each other after disaster. (I believe we badly overestimate our ability to "drop down" a tech level in an emergency; such lifestyles must be maintained by practice.)
Peter F. Hamilton loves talking about this. Offhand, I can't think of a single one of his books that doesn't at least mention this concept. He really likes to explore the very long-term evolution of the relationship between humans and technology. You get simple low-tech societies governed and protected by the most sophisticated AI it's possible or conceivable to build, lots of backwater planets with no money for technology, idealistic societies that set up a new way of life, farm planets, all sorts.
Look at 'The Dreaming Void' trilogy. It's very explicitly a juxtaposition between high 30th century intergalactic technology and a society living on a planet where electricity simply doesn't work. It's one of my favorites.
But that process was invented in 1900 and doesn't require any remotely advanced technology. The ancient Romans could have pulled it off with the technology at the time, though probably at much smaller scale.
I guess it depends on whether you want to consider chemistry a technology. The chemistry to turn atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia has obviously always been there, we just didn't discover it until recently. If you told an ancient alchemist how to combine the ingredients under pressure, they could produce fertilizer from air, iron, and acid. Is that knowledge a type of technology?
Thats actually kind of the world we live in right now. With of course capitalism and aggressive extraction the whole choosing what level to live on doesnt really work well.
I was introduced to it by The Hugonauts podcast. Have a great audio rendering of it[0]. I went into it not knowing anything about the book or the author and was really surprised to find out it was written over 100 years ago.
[0] https://hugonauts.simplecast.com/episodes/the-machine-stops-...
"The Mending Apparatus was itself in need of repair."
Both were written at, and the film Moulin Rouge! strives to depict, a time whose specific and rather rancid vibe the phrase fin de siècle (literally 'end of cycle' sharing the relevant root with 'secular,' but in proper translation 'end of the century') was adopted into English to describe. That phrase has been occurring to me with some frequency this year.
The magic of the technology described in the story is where we have always been headed.
I think the machine is just other people. And maybe the music has seemed off lately.
Or man's relationship to nature?
Hi HN waves; Reddit, news aggregators, the 24 hour news cycle. One quote I went looking for, which sticks in my mind, was about novel ideas:
> "Had she had any ideas lately? ... That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one —that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it."
She's talking of the Orion's Belt constellation[1], which she has never seen because she lives underground in The Machine (city). It stuck with me how quickly she dismisses the idea because it isn't immediately useful. Jony Ive said that once in an interview decades ago, why he had to move to America, because new ideas are weak and need nurturing and the UK culture dismisses them too easily but America supports them. I saw that basic concept just now on HN comment about EU startups, that EU people see startups as too risky and Americans are enthusiastic about them[2]. Orion's Belt ties to so many ideas, the stars as a shared canvas, projection of our own view up onto them, culture-specific constellaitons, the signs of the Zodiac mark the path the Sun takes overhead, different constellations visible in different hemispheres, imagery as dots, imagination filling in missing details, an ancient time when skies were clear and everyone could see them. I see Orion's Belt through Winter here in the UK but maybe there are people in the Southern Hemisphere who don't see it, so I linked to DuckDuckGo below; worse, maybe there are people in cities with light pollution who never see stars or constellations at all?
Social Media notifications:
> "Vashti’s next move was to turn off the isolation-switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Had she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? —say this day month."
The rise of interest in Urban planning and human scale cities:
> “You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say ‘space is annihilated,’ but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves. I determined to recover it, and I began by walking up and down the platform of the railway outside my room. Up and down, until I was tired, and so did recapture the meaning of ‘Near’ and ‘Far.’ ‘Near’ is a place to which I can get quickly on my feet, not a place to which the train or the airship will take me quickly. ‘Far’ is a place to which I cannot get quickly on my feet; the vomitory is ‘far,’ though I could be there in thirty-eight seconds by summoning the train. Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong."
LLM Stories:
> So respirators were abolished, and with them, of course, the terrestrial motors [access to the surface / outside], and except for a few lecturers, who complained that they were debarred access to their subject-matter, the development was accepted quietly. Those who still wanted to know what the earth was like had after all only to listen to some gramophone, or to look into some cinematophote. And even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject.
Was it prescient or was it just observing things already happening 100 years ago?
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=orion%27s+belt+constellatio...
Americans were much slower to forget, which is why we correctly spurn the metric system for all save technologists and likewise self-fettering minds. Unfortunately, the tech industry exists, for the moment.
Life is a matter of a miracle that is collected over time by moments, flabbergasted to be in each other's presence. The world is an exam to see if we can rise into direct experience. Our eyesight is here as a test to see if we can see beyond it. Matter is here as a test for our curiosity. Doubt is here as an exam for our vitality. Thomas Mann wrote that he would rather participate in life than write 100 stories.
Giacometti was once run down by a car, and he recalled falling into a lucid faint, a sudden exhilaration, as he realized that at last something was happening to him. An assumption develops that you cannot understand life and live life simultaneously. I do not agree entirely. Which is to say I do not exactly disagree. I would say that life understood is life lived. But the paradoxes bug me, and I can learn to love and make love to the paradoxes that bug me. And on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion.
Before you drift off, don't forget. Which is to say, remember. Because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting. Lorca, in that same poem said that the iguanas will bite those who do not dream. And as one realizes that one is a dream figure in another person's dream, that is self awareness... " ~Timothy Levitch in “Waking Life”
++upvoted to null the dofus who thinks expressing opinions about the metric system is a crime against humanity
> But the paradoxes bug me, and I can learn to love and make love to the paradoxes that bug me. And on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion.
Now this is the way to live.