The present state of technological development should produce significant alarm in peoples’ minds. A philosophical person will quickly realize that due to the current environment of social media, the internet, and electronic services more broadly (chat gpt, smart appliances, etc), all people are becoming dulled and vacant-minded.
This is because these developments aim to make living so easy that one need not partake in the process of the action at all. One might idly while away the day scrolling on their phone only living on half-thoughts.
Though one should avoid haughtily judging people in such a state. It is not a matter of choice. It would take a soul of such liveliness and purity to move through this digitally degenerating world without themselves drudging through the rot.
The insidious designs of these machines are so that they are accessed instinctively. The motion of the hand slips silently under one’s reason, and before they have had time to think the word rejection they are subject to the screen.
We all now see and suffer this reality. Some worse than others due to matters of circumstance, nevertheless, this state cannot be abided. In matters of consciousness, one must make the effort, in the matters of the mind, one must be a resolute guard, in matters of the human soul both of the individual and the species, one must act with fanaticism.
The machines must be stopped, something must be done. The only question is how our duty must be carried out.
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Before venturing further I will make a warning. The questions which surround this subject are enormous, and I am not of such a titanic mind as to be capable of answering them. All I am capable of is to blindly feel out the way, and hope my course is true.
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In my mind I feel there are two primary elements which an effort to reduce, restrict, and reconstruct technology must consider.
The first is the Social, cultural, and communal. The primary difficulty in avoiding technology is it’s practical and cultural stranglehold on public life.
One cannot work, socialize, remain informed, nor participate in culture without these devices. This is the first issue that must be rectified.
It is my feeling, that a concerted effort to develop culture outside the internet is necessary. I personally like folk culture, pre-digital (and often pre-industrial) traditions which were not curated, nor produced by an upheld artist class, but born from the average life, and produced with spontaneity. I feel such traditions are worth reviving, and would be helpful in drawing out the cultural consciousness from the machines.
To make this work, and also to be successful in removing the internet as a requirement for the existence of a social life, there needs to be a physical restructuring of the community. The accessibility and the publicization of social space is, in my mind, critical.
As for the matter of divorcing technology from work, I am at a loss, obviously the one lever here is the profit incentive, it is profitable to have access to the employees 24/7, and somehow we must find a way to reverse this. It does not immediately occur to me how that might be done.
But it is with success in these things that it may be possible to live one's life without technology and this is critical.
Not so that it can all be abandoned in whole, though certainly it is acceptable to do so. Rather, it returns the use of technology to a choice. The ability to consent or refuse the use of technology is the most fundamental principle that must be advocated for and achieved if our society is to progress technology in a new and positive direction.
The second significant element to this effort is the matter of policy and technological control.
Firstly, there is no efficient apparatus to consider, advocate for, and implement restrictions and regulations of the unethical development of new technology. The developers of social media, so called “AI”, and similar works must constantly be hounded, scrutinized, and subject to ethical interrogation. Their current wanton and careless development patterns have been nothing short of disastrous and degenerate, it is not that development must slow or cease, but that it must be reoriented, with great force, to ensure it is chained to the goal of the common human good.
Secondly, and in reciprocation to the first point, technology is under the command of the least qualified people. We live in a profitable society, so it is run by profitable men. In profit there is no room for ethics, nor honor, nor even the restraint of decency and dignity.
Such a society has no room for human beings. Hence the use of the machine.
The advocacy for neo-luddism, web 1.5, or whatever this principle shall be called, is really a microcosm of the effort to produce a society governed by morality.
It may not be possible to produce such a radical change through such a specific movement, however, we can radicalize our own project. The access we have to the current political and cultural system is unique. Technology and its law is not highly politicized nor partisan in the mainstream. Through a concerted effort, it may be possible to take total command of the narrative around technological development, regulation, and its effect on society. Really I mean to say, people who are interested in this issue, as I am have the initiative, the first step to victory.
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