There is no more dangerous force in this world today than the belief that 'technology will fix (climate change, income inequality, the energy crisis)'. Huge swathes of reasonably educated, reasonably left-leaning people are in total thrall to this idea.
My arguments as presented to a futurist who was incapable of responding to them, because I can't be bothered to rewrite:
And when another 4 or 5 or 6 presidencies come and go with nothing substantive done to address climate change, income inequality, resource depletion, will America survive? Will the world as we know it survive? The primary damage of Trump is another four or eight years wasted when we've already run out of time.
Oh well if it's 'human nature' *mocking tone and air quotes* then I guess we don't really need to worry do we? This is why I'm so angry, because in the back of your mind you KNOW that we're fucked, but you don't even care enough to let it bother you or your daily routine. We can't just wish that technology will fix everything so we don't have to worry because you know what? We HAVE the technology to fix it. We have for fifty fucking years! Nuclear energy, wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, none of these are new at all, electric cars aren't even new but if you want to argue that batteries weren't good enough previously, well okay, but we had electric streetcars a hundred fucking years ago. We already have the solutions, the people in power just don't care enough to implement them! So when are you going to wake the fuck up?
How much 'worse' are you willing to accept? Food riots when a large portion of farming land is made unusable? Hundreds of thousands dying per year from storms? A refugee crisis to make the current 'crisis' look like the piddling distraction from real issues it is? How about when even the first world nations start deciding who lives and who dies based on how much money they have? I'm not denying it's an uphill struggle but fuck, we're not even going to try? If we tore down the corrupt self-serving media then maybe we could start holding the politicians to account, and if we did that, maybe we could even start constraining the rich and using their resources for the good of mankind before they all fuck off to Mars and leave us on this dying planet.
Oh come on… You have to use an incredibly pedantic and stupid definition of 'knowledge' for that to be true, computers running random protein folding or archiving social media is not 'knowledge doubling', and like I said that isn't the problem anyway, we already know what the problems are and how to solve them (practically, just not politically), and trust in scientists hasn't been any lower since they hung people for disagreeing with the Church. I'm not interested in the horseshit that the modern-day state philosophers are trying to sell us about how if we just lay back and let the corporations somehow fix everything it'll all work out. It's nothing better than brainwashing to keep the liberal well-educated from rebelling, it's little better than promises that Heaven awaits if you just keep working hard for your feudal master until you die. If you can believe that shit then lucky you. You'll die just like the rest of us in the end but at least you won't worry about it, eh?
What can we do about these people? Also feel free to criticise my shit arguing.
Gavin Jones
I fucking hate the """technocrat""" STEMfags at my place that think it can be solved with more tech. Some will say it to get more funding for themselves, some will say it because they think the tech ain't already there to fix 90% of our problems. We really just lack a determined and powerful organization that wishes to apply it all.
A science-lover like you should know better than anyone else how much power our technology has gave humanity, and how much effect it is having and will have on humanity. We're not going extinct probably, but the next thirty-or-so years will be practical permanent crisis if we, as a society, won't make sure that our political and economic system is aligned with our interests. Huge water shortages will spread even to well-developed countries. Gigantic migrant waves (that will make the Syrian refugee crisis look like a single gumball in a ballpit filled with the things) will try to come even through borders that would shoot them on sight, because it beats literal starvation. This will only fuel alt-right fearmongering and increase political polarization on idpol lines. Humongous economic crises from pulled investments due to unprofitable living conditions will only exacerbate the existing income inequality due to people losing their jobs. Governments will carry the costs to maintain the economic system and will end up dependent on the people loaning them the money. The countries and their people, by proxy, will end up as colonized debt-slaves to pay it all off.
Technology and globalized society has increased our vulnerability to all of these things that they're practically an inevitability if we cannot organize to fix shit in a way that has our interests at heart, not the interests of the powerful. But if we let them have all of that technology, and relinquish what little we have left to a small group of people that can't be held accountable by any means, we will have lost the fight. And don't think you can join them just because you got a degree in electrotechnological mathematichemical mechanophysics. They will us and abuse you as their subordinate, with no more freedom than a dog.
Christopher Long
destroy civilization now!
Levi Russell
Luddite Gang assemble!
Cooper Morris
How can any technocrat take you seriously when they aren't even allowed to have a flag on this board?
It's almost as if you weren't interested in having an actual discussion at all.
Ian Young
Read Zerzan.
John Hughes
Your typical "technocrat" would put economists in charge of the economy.
Xavier Johnson
economists hate technocrats with a passion man
Logan Gonzalez
Depends on if your mean technocrat or Technocrat, the latter are followers of Howard Scott that came up with the energy theory of value, (think LTV but replace labor time with joules of energy). Howard Scott created Technocracy Inc that promoted the idea that the economy was a engineering problem thus engineers should be in charge of the state and economy.
Adrian Morgan
The one's I'm familiar with usually interpret it as "experts on a certain subject should be in charge of that subject", which, considering our system of ministries and advisors next to them, is not that much different actually.
Also this topic isn't really about Technocrats the ideology, I view the corporate wannabe dictators as more actively malicious, the futurists are the deluded sheep in this equation who don't really think about the problem and assume technology will fix things without them having to do anything, the neo-feudalists in Silicon Valley are more this.
Well did you hear, there's a natural order Those most deserving will end up with the most That the cream cannot help but always rise up to the top Well I say, "Shit floats"
Brayden Watson
Because technological progress often happens at the same time as social progress.
All countries except Burgerland are trying to reduce emissions. Which can’t be done without nuclear power and Carbon Capture, but “technology”is evil so it’s better to just force everyone into a wooden hut instead. t you
Annon you haven’t been paying attention to the news. THere’s been massive worker strikes occurring, and leftist are gaing popularity with the masses. Also no one is claiming that technology will solve wealth inequality, what there claiming, and what is a reasonable assumption is that advancing technology will solve environmental and resource problems.
A fucking meme. New resource deposits are being discovered faster than we can extract.
It’ll survive as much as the Russian Empire Survived
Are you talking about Howard Scott, or Zuckenburgfags? Very different people
Michael Robinson
No self respecting engineer would ever take orders from an economist who produces nothing of value.
I just told you how to solve income inequality; universal income via automation.
Climate change is even easier. Instead of releasing waste products like CO2 to the atmosphere, the gas can easily be reacted with other chemicals to form useful products. The only reason this doesn't happen is because the market would be flooded with cheap goods, and it would crash the economy as it stands today. The technology already exists for such endeavors.
Resource depletion is much of the same story as climate change. Refusal to recycle waste products because of greedy desire to maintain profit margins and "scarcity."
As you can see, every problem you've listed is man made, and completely within the control of the corporations that rule us.
Now give me my goddamned technocrat flag already.
Adrian Smith
Howard Scott is more like the person who created the bitcoin of his time, but failed miserably.
Decentralized energy units still might be an interesting option today though.
The silicon valley overlords want complete control of all the technology we have, they aren't interested in any ideals only control.
Gabriel Watson
Howard Scott wasn’t an idealist though. He’s more like an American Stalin.
Austin Edwards
4 or 5 or 6 presidencies? The most recent report said we have to fix shit by 2030 to avoid total collapse. That's 3 presidencies max.
Brayden Davis
Hence failure.
Jayden Carter
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
Isaiah Ramirez
Most technocrats happen to be "anarcho"capitalists. Don't blame us, blame yourselves for your bourgeois reputation.
John James
A technocracy would only benefit the proletariat. Universal income alone would greatly benefit the proletariat.
I'm having a hard time believing that you have met an actual technocrat. Are you shitposting?
Aren't Ancap supposed to be a joke?
Grayson Howard
Anprim faggot pls go
Jaxson James
[citation;needed]
Liam Wright
kys
Isaiah Morales
Go home porky, you're drunk
Matthew Lopez
the universal income is there to maintain income equality jackass.
Is there a downside to giving free healthcare? Because that's what a technocracy provides.
Sup armchair poster, what have you actually done to help the environment? A technocracy doesn't have corporate desires. It is more concerned with efficiency, and wise use of resources. The over abundance created by these techniques allows for free healthcare, free food, and more importantly a sustained environment.
Tell me how any porky could be in favor of those things?
Camden Reyes
How can one speak so much while understanding so very very little, lel
Asher Long
Why should I? Not like anything can be changed at this point if I just turn off the lights when I'm not using them or whatever else your retarded mind believe it will make a difference
Carter Hall
Libs really do live in their own little world >le oh le no le global le warming"climate change" le increase
Adam Richardson
Yet it is beneath you to tell me what's wrong lol. Underage ban pls.
So you admit you are as helpless as a 5 year old. Congrats. Maybe you'll join the adult table, when you have sway in your community.
Fucking armchair posters are only interested in shitposting.
Andrew Anderson
You speak as if you have any more power over over changing the environment than I do
David Brown
I've been involved in successful court cases against polluters. Not that you'd ever believe that.
Gavin Perez
Indeed I don't believe that. Nor that it would change much if it was true regardless.
Ah shit I should have used this picture for the OP instead.
When did I say technology was evil genius, my point is we already have the technology to stop climate change, in fact we had it 50 years ago, it's just not being used. You missed the whole argument and are the exact person I made the topic about.
Is this the power of Anglo Propaganda? Also post the better version next time.
Because the world right now is Capitalist interested in long-term profits. However the more we Automate and Industrialize the lower the rate of profit becomes, drawing us closer to socialism. Socialists who want to try to reduce Industrialize and Technological Progress allow capitalism to stay along for longer. Which will make Climate Change worse.
"The radical thrust of utopian thinking, as exemplified by Fourier, has been transmuted by academics, statisticians, and "game theorists" into a thoroughly technocratic, economistic, and aggressive series of futuramas that can be appropriately designated as "futurism". However widely at odds utopias were in their values, institutional conceptions, and visions (whether ascetic or hedonistic, authoritarian or libertarian, privatistic or communistic, utilitarian or ethical), they at least come to mean a revolutionary change in the status quo and a radical critique of its abuses. Futurism, at its core, holds no such promise at all. In the writings of such people as Herman Kahn, Buckminster Fuller, Alvin Toffler, John O'Neil, and the various seers in Stanford University's "think-tanks," futurism is essentially an extrapolation of the present into the century ahead, of "prophesy" denatured to mere projection. It does not challenge existing social relationships and institutions, but seeks to adapt them to seemingly new technological imperatives and possibilities—thereby redeeming rather than critiquing them. The present does not disappear; it persists and acquires eternality at the expense of the future. Futurism, in effect, does not enlarge the future but annihilates it by absorbing it into the present. What makes this trend so insidious is that it also annihilates the imagination itself by constraining it to the present, thereby reducing our vision—even our prophetic abilities—to mere extrapolation." - Bookchin
That propaganda was made by Alan Mak, he's actually a British Conservative MP for Havant and the guy is only 33 years old too which is surprising for how out of touch he is.
But of course, he's a lawyer so he is completely oblivious to what's going on with automation or any struggles that people with median incomes have to deal with.
