I test drove the first-generation Tesla Roadster. I once lived on Soylent powder shakes for a month. My Twitter account is almost old enough to drive. I wrote a book about the iPhone.

Also, I’m a Luddite. That’s not the contradiction that it might sound like. The original Luddites did not hate technology. Most were skilled machine operators. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, what they objected to were the specific ways that tech was being used to undermine their status, upend their communities and destroy their livelihoods. So they took sledgehammers to the mechanized looms used to exploit them.

  • NightAuthor@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    But if the political environment is oppressive, do we want to give it another tool and just be like “now be sure to use it for good”.

    I agree that no technology is inherently evil, not even something like the atomic bomb. But you have to consider the actual and likely future environment that the technology will be in. And this state of regulatory capture, let the largest pocket book have the most speech, ever consolidating wealth and power situation is not one in which I believe we should be contributing new potentially oppressive technologies. We should be hindering them as we simultaneously work to reform our government and economic structure.