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here's the gist,
if your father, elene, trades a horse for a tractor, it may lessen the physical labour he has to do to get his farm plowed, seeded, weeded, harvested and all that.
you feel that this lessening of one man's physical burden is a good thing, and therefore the change from horse to tractor is seen as progress.
however, you're completely ignoring all the bad things that go with that tractor. Before you even start it up to get it going, it has polluted land, river and air, through the extraction, refinement, manufacture, marketing, transportation and assembly of all its parts. There are lots of people involved in this whole network, and for many of them, their physical labour has increased with a move to industrialised cities.
but you neglect to consider these factors when looking at the "good" of the tractor. I don't call the industrialised mercantile system good, or progress towards something better.
In fact, I think it's a step in the wrong direction, and is increasingly harmful to a growing number of people.
I think that the technologies that could truly be considered progressive would be anything that's more elegant than what we currently use, as opposed to more intricate.
If you add a clock to a stereo, that's more intricate, but it isn't any more elegant.
we think that by developing technologies that put more power (in terms of mechanistic strength and computation speed) into the hands of anyone who can afford them, that we progress along steps of improvement. The result hasn't been a better society with kinder, gentler relations between friends, neighbours and so on. Quite the opposite.
People increasingly rely on cellular telephones (which I presume is one of those decisions I don't get to make), yet they are also tied to increasing rates of cancer in salivary glands among their users. How would you define progress in this example?
People drive automobiles, the most dangerous form of locomotion we've yet devised, because they believe that they're safer. How would you define progress here?
We've made weapons out of plutonium, much better than the incindiary ones. How is this progress?
Is being able to buy a pineapple in Canada in February really a sign of progress?
Are seedless fruit a sign of progress?
I think that in each case, no. These technological developments are presented to us as improvements, when they are anything but.
don't believe the hype.
elene, you baffle me with your dismissive posts.
but that's OK, I don't mind bafflement. |
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