
(2016) Technology destroys people and places. I’m rejecting it - c1sc0
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/19/life-without-technology-rejecting-technology
======
Rainymood
>Technology destroys people. We’re already cyborgs (pacemakers, hearing aids)
of a sort, and are well on our way to the type of Big Brother dystopia of the
techno-utopians

This one cuts quite close to the bone and I find this comment quite
shortsighted and in poor taste.

My mother's life was saved by some extremely swift handling by medical
professionals and (here it comes) technology. Where I'm from, if someone has a
heart attack everyone in the vicinity who is trained gets a text message with
the location and/or situation.

By sheer luck one of these people was in the neighbourhood and got a text
message. By another stupidly lucky coincidence this woman had a defibrillator
at home, which was nearby. She ran to her home, got the machine, and ran to
our home and tried to restore my mother's heartbeat.

I don't know the details but my mother was saved by technology that day and
she's been living roughly 10 years now with a little machine next to her
heart. Every time her heart beats in an irregular fashion the machine gives a
little zap (which hurts, a lot) and restores the beat. Luckily, this happens
rarely, but still.

I'm not sure where I am going with this rant, but someone very dear to me was
saved by technology, and i'd take the cyborg life over being dead.

~~~
dennis_jeeves
>Where I'm from, if someone has a heart attack everyone in the vicinity who is
trained gets a text message with the location and/or situation.

Can you elaborate on the technical side of detection of the heart attack and
the alerts? Also where do you live?

------
jesperlang
> but slowness only became a bad thing when time became money.

This. After downscaling my expenses and started working at 25-50% it's amazing
how much time I got now compared to working full time. We really under value
time and have a weird perspective on it and what we can use it for. Walking to
the shop can take 45 minutes for me now which seem ridiculous for some when a
car ride takes 5-10 minutes. But what is not accounted for is that slowness
itself has value, I have time for reflection while walking, I get fresh air
and move my body, I don't need to worry about a car and its costs. The same
goes for food. I used to do alot of take outs when I worked full time but now
I don't hesitate to prepare and cook for 2-3 hours, I get a much more intimate
experience with food, I learn things and get to eat food that taste great.

~~~
c1sc0
This. Indeed. Overall we spend far too much time working to afford
“necessities” & “conveniences” that are neither.

------
incadenza
Why stop there? I don’t think Native Americans lived in log cabins.
Antibiotics and modern medicine should undoubtedly be cast to the trash heap
as well. I can’t help but feel like simply limiting screen time is the
solution here...

~~~
beauzero
...and I think we will start seeing that happen. I relate this to the Pamphlet
wars when printing became cheap.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_wars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_wars)

History repeats itself...well it's at least similar.

~~~
avoutthere
Thank you for posting this. I had not heard of the Pamphlet wars.

------
ryanmercer
I wrote something like this last year
[https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2017/2/13/i-miss-
th...](https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2017/2/13/i-miss-the-20th-
century)

I miss the face to face interactions, I miss community, I miss boredom and a
considerably simpler life. At the same time though I love that I have friends
all over the world, many of which I've never met, but know just as well as
local friends. I love that I can go on YouTube and see all sorts of amazing
and interesting things. I love that I can share and discuss ideas with
strangers on BBS/forums/sites like HN and Reddit. I love that an an adapter
from Automatic tells my phone data from my car that then gets pushed to
various places via IFTTT so that I can create a record of all of my driving
and vehicle diagnostic alerts for potential use in the future.

As I said in my blog post I have my foot in both worlds, being born in the mid
80's I was there for the birth of the modern internet and still had several
years of my life where I didn't even know the internet existed. Now the
internet is effectively an augmentation to my own person.

~~~
twiceaday
Modern society is worse given your value structure because your value
structure is a product of, and therefore tailored for, an "older" society.
Yes, there are other people who feel the same way: people who were instilled
with the same value structure by the same society you grew up in. No, I don't
think there is anything necessarily fundamental here that will apply to future
generations.

------
adreamingsoul
I think his heart is in the right place, but the execution is over-reactive.

Here are my ideas that I want to implement for myself: 1\. Move back to dumb
phones, landlines, or a wifi phone. 2\. Limit movie/video consumption to a
fixed time limit per day. For example, 1 hour a day. 3\. Re-use old
technology/re-cycle technology waste before buying new. 4\. Move back to bare
metal servers, and self-host. 5\. Use simpler technologies that have no
environmental impact. 6\. Only invest in technology that is repairable and
long-lasting.

~~~
mieseratte
> I think his heart is in the right place, but the execution is over-reactive.

I feel similarly.

Over the past year or so I've had a set of changes in personal lifestyle and
philosophy. I've become very anti-possessions and very anti-technology. At
first, getting rid of all social media, cell-phones, TVs, and such. Being a
software engineer, I have to have a computer, and I kept my old iPod Touch,
stuck on iOS 6, for music and reading a few eBooks (shout-out to the Kindle
folks, the old versions still work!).

I'm slowly forming a sort-of Amish Hackers[0] rubric for evaluation. Does
something help or hurt personal physical and mental well-being, does it help
social unit cohesion, or is it purely consumptive and or narcissistic? As a
result, I've slowly brought some things back.

Do I need smartphone to take selfies so I can become "Instagram famous?" No.
But communicating on-the-go is necessary, so a feature phone it is. Do I need
a TV? Do I need a fancy Fight Club Ikea apartment? No. But I do need a place
where I can reasonably entertain guests.

Like most things, it's about finding a healthy balance between "consumer
zombie" and "Richard Stallman Impersonator of the Year."

[0] - [http://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-
hackers-a/](http://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/)

~~~
adreamingsoul
I appreciate the Amish Hackers reference, thank you.

------
pavel_lishin
> _(I’ve never found doing the work to buy and maintain them particularly
> convenient)._

They ain't called conveniences because they're convenient to purchase and
maintain. They're called conveniences because they're more convenient than
beating your clothes with rocks down at the river, and more convenient than
skinning a rabbit and turning it over a spit.

Anyway, he seems to have thought all this out. I'm glad he's doing this, and
I'm glad he's not presenting it as a solution for everyone.

------
dmortin
There should be a middle way between this and our current lifestyle. Eschewing
all technology also means eschewing the positive things technology provides to
us.

~~~
eludwig
>>There should be a middle way between this and our current lifestyle

Exactly. There are countless ways to live. There are outliers and extremes
that point the way to a sane middle ground. How else would we know the middle
without exploration of the fringes?

------
dmortin
What if he gets sick? Will he refuse modern medicine too and turn to
traditional ones? Because if he accepts modern medicine, then he does use
modern technology, that is, its results, so he still relies on other people
working on technology which modern science uses a lot.

So he enjoys the benefits without sharing the costs.

------
kradeelav
Without technology I'd be 100% deaf and effectively locked out of the cutting
edge of the working world given the added friction of communicating.

Without technology, I'd be paralyzed or dead as I required 15 major surgeries
in my childhood to stabilize a [unnamed condition]. (It bears saying - worth
it. It was hell, but it was worth it.)

Without technology, I'd be blind, and again - have a much higher chance of
being locked out of the ability to sustain myself financially, not to mention
be robbed of my love of design / illustration.

Without technology, there would be a great deal less souls on this earth -
(more than I think most would realize since we don't typically care to flaunt
our reliance on technology.)

\---

Ironically, I'm also as "minimal technology" as they come - still use a dumb
phone out of privacy and notification concerns, will never buy a voice
assistant, am only on the social networks that my job demands, et cetera.
Acknowledging that tech does wonders certainly does not mean you have to be
blind to the horrors that it's equally capable of, or that you're defenseless
against it.

I am ... very tired of having to defend a part of my existence from statements
like these, where more compassionate thinking could illuminate a thousand more
examples like the above.

Very tired.

------
jcfrei
Interesting opinion piece. I've previously written about the rise of
technoskepticism: [http://jcfrei.com/technological-
primacy/](http://jcfrei.com/technological-primacy/)

------
cromulent
(2016) . He posts updates to _The Guardian_ , e.g. this one.

[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/19/a-year...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/19/a-year-
without-tech-debt-gadgets-reconnect-nature)

------
nbeleski
It feels he is not really wrong on many of his points, but this ain't a
solution that he is proposing.

Technology is not going away, we need to learn to live with it and have it as
a tool to better our lives. It feels that today technology has too much
control over people lives. The effects of social media are becoming better
understood by the day. Maybe it is time to separete better which technologies
are really useful from those that are hardly so.

Life is too short to be spent on Instagram (soon deploying it's lite version
to many developing countries...)

------
agumonkey
I have fantasies of similar lifestyle. And to an extent rebooting technology
by using simple tools, simpler ways and materials. Maybe just enough to build
optics and radio.

I agree with him that we're at a point where technology is backfiring. 100
years ago anything was pure improvement. Food conservation, mobility,
television. But I feel we're hitting a ceiling.

------
davelnewton
> Technology destroys people.

I'd disagree. Technology is a tool like any other; it may destroy _you_ , but
that's anecdotal. It is not a _requirement_ that it destroy people or take
them away from what they find important.

~~~
toomuchtodo
“The current regulatory framework in place in the majority of jurisdictions is
allowing technology to become a net negative for both people and society as a
whole”.

I make a distinction between science and technology for the sake of this
comment. Science brings us biomedical breakthroughs, space probes, and
renewables; technology brings us Black Mirror dystopian futures.

(“Technology destroys people” is a lazy argument, but understandable in a time
when it’s rare for long form discussion to take place where the depth of the
issue can be examined collaboratively)

~~~
pavel_lishin
It sounds like our variant of capitalism is the system that's destroying
people, not technology.

~~~
XorNot
Bingo!

I feel like you get this type of article from Americans as a cowardly way to
avoid criticising unchecked capitalism or dealing with and engaging with their
politics as a means to build a better government.

Easier to blame a nebulous concept and the individual, then advocate for any
sort of group cooperatism - even though as a species cooperating is what we've
always done.

~~~
davelnewton
I don't think it's capitalism per se that's at issue, rather its execution:
unethical capitalism is bad. Making money is not.

------
cleanyourroom
He has some valid complaints, as did Ted Kaczynski. Dropping out of the world
seems as unlikely to make anything better as blowing up random people.

------
waiquoo
Isn't this the kind of understandable reaction that is explored in 'Zen and
the art of motorcycle maintenance"?

------
api
I have a new hypothesis I'm terming "sublimation of criticism." This is likely
not original since this isn't my field, but here goes.

The campaign to exterminate any alternative political discourse in the West
has been so successful that it's now very hard to even talk about any
alternative to state corporatist capitalism. This system has many downsides
and generates many negative externalities and these are clearly visible to
many people, but since the system can't be directly criticized people try to
pin its shortcomings on other things like "technology" (an absurdly general
term) or thrash around chasing conspiracy ghosts. It's a kind of philosophical
scapegoating and fantasizing as a substitute for actual directed criticism.

In other words the effectively prohibited criticism of the system _sublimes_
into other areas.

Maybe state corporatist capitalism destroys people and places. Try that.

I wonder if this phenomenon was common in the late USSR?

~~~
IanDrake
>The campaign to exterminate any alternative political discourse in the West
has been so successful that it's now very hard to even talk about any
alternative

I’ve seen no evidence of that and with the severity of your claim should you
should include a source or two.

Perhaps you’re confusing people disagreeing with your view with people
attempting to silence you. Those are two very different things.

Recall the Occupy Wall Street protest where they camped out in downtown NYC
for a month? They broke all sorts of laws but were allowed to stay. That
doesn’t sound like “extermination”.

What I do see is violence from communist and anarchists against speech that
they deem fascists, but are really just moderate voices. I can provide video
links if you need, but it’s common knowledge at this point.

We still live in a democracy and so long as we do, you’re going to have to
live with consensus, which doesn’t see things your way.

~~~
XorNot
Yes I guess a literal neo-nazi terrorist attack didn't happen on American
soil.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally)

Oh wait it did. And so have numerous ongoing campaigns of harassment and death
threats against any dissenting voices. Like this guy:
[https://www.12news.com/mobile/article/news/local/valley/phoe...](https://www.12news.com/mobile/article/news/local/valley/phoenix-
man-posts-photos-of-giving-up-his-guns-gets-death-threats/481212566)

Even advocated for by the current President of the United States:
[https://newrepublic.com/minutes/128896/beat-protester-
trumps...](https://newrepublic.com/minutes/128896/beat-protester-trumps-rally-
hell-cover-legal-fees)

~~~
IanDrake
I don’t think an organized group like Antifa promoting “by any means
necessary” and getting tacit approval from the main stream left is comparable
to one (universally condemned) deranged lunatic, a bunch of keyboard warriors,
and something stupid Trump said once.

There aren’t right leaning groups out there organizing violent protests at
college campuses trying to prevent left leaning speakers from being heard.

------
dingo_bat
> Technology destroys people and places. I’m rejecting it

Read all about it on your smartphone/laptop.

------
ChrisArchitect
put a date on this old article title! [2016]

~~~
c1sc0
Edited

------
gmiller123456
TL;DR; By "destroys people" he means "destroys their relationship with nature"
and causes a sedentary lifestyle which leads to "industrial-scale afflictions
of cancer, mental illness, obesity, heart disease, auto-immune disorders and
food intolerances".

He should probably use technology to look up the actual causes of some of
those. As well as observe the fact that lots of people are not sedentary
despite their heavy use of technology.

------
zoltaan
Technology does not destroys people.

People destroy people!

Technology just sits there doing nothing without someone starts using it.

