I loved LoM, though I would rather live in Mordor, personally. I need as much grounding in that "real world" as possible, and have to touch-grass 6X a day to ward off depression.
The biggest tech changes are SO big, you kind of can't see them. Suddenly you're just in a forest, where did the trees come from.
Antibiotics. Water treatment. Crop rotation and new crops, tripling English food production in the 1600s. (That comes from "The Day the Universe Changed" and the title is your thesis, writ even more forcefully.)
But not every technology makes much difference, not that adopted! E-reading peaked ages ago at 20% of book sales - mostly to old(!) people who want the variable fonts.
Here's the biggie, though. I spent an hour trying to come up with a tech that really had been flatly forbidden, because it somehow would change the world for the better, but for the worse of those currently in charge, a real smoking-gun. (Enshittification is controlling HOW a tech was used, not forbidding digital content transmission, so not an example.)
It was really hard: we do seem to have a free-enough society that the only examples I could think of were posited as direct threats to citizens, needing protection: drones above your house got illegal fast. Psychedelics and other drugs, sometimes banned entirely as "no medical purpose", but with at least a fig-leaf claim of danger.
The perfect example is the family of contraceptive and abortion technologies. Contraceptives have been illegal at times for ages, and we all know about abortion, even after the technology for it became safer than giving birth. It's today's headlines, where the banning of a "family" of technologies that all allow women to control their own fertility, are to be banned entirely.
And we call this issue of banning a technological family the #1 central issue in a, wait for it:
Culture War.
What culture will we have? The old one where women are controlled by their biology, or where they have their biology under control? Those are two radically different cultures.
True, X is a product. The technology is the engagement algorithm. For example, I suspect Mastodon is still easy to connect to in Brazil. It's essentially the same product, but the algorithm is different. This makes all the difference in how it affects people. --Of course, there are nuances here, and lacking a rigorous definition of "technology" my argument is always going to be a little loose.
I have remind readers that Brazil didn't set out to ban Twitter as a platform, but rather certain accounts that the court found were spreading disinformation. It only ended up as a platform ban because Musk refused and systematically evaded enforcement. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg41n533zno
In other words, they were attempting to moderate the effects of this technology, but those operating it refused, which they were able to do because they largely resided abroad. It's very much an issue specific to the Internet; most technologies are easier to control, if the political will is there.
Yes and no. In Canada we have a pervasive problem with smuggled guns coming from the U.S. We may have sane gun laws here, but the lack of those south of the border means there's a dangerous spillover effect. In general though I agree that the Internet creates an environment that's much harder to control. A good book on this subject is "The Myth of The Good Corporate Citizen" by Murray Dobbin.
I work in a field that uses the backwards ancestor of ai image generation: image recognition. We scan lots of product looking for flaws, save all the images, and bring certain flaws to the attention to humans. Like me. Well, that's not the only thing I do, so if that gets improved I'll spend time doing other things. It's a slowly shifting job with slowly shifting product it seems. Held back by all this... matter in the manufacuring.
I have such a morlock mindset that I wonder what the life is like for those who maintain the tech locks, is that touched on in Lady of Mazes?
Fascinating. The pace of change of technologies is one thing we should try to control. To answer your question, I always figured that the tech locks maintain themselves, in the manner of much of the AI in the book. There are founders for many manifolds, such as Maren Ellis, who presumably curate for their logic and contents.
Well, the progress that makes things with new features need new tooling machines to make, also means the old tooling machines get used for different product. Actually making wealth to keep up with what people want has been a bottleneck for so long... I can see the 'move fast and break things' way is kinda like eating unhealthy amounts of food because our instincts are based on starvation more than heart health.
Sousa was both right and wrong. It's true the oral aural culture he championed has been massively impacted by the growth of civilization. At the same time, his band (he naturally refused to conduct for recordings) made quite a number of records in its time, which is, as for many artists of that time, the only way we can know now what they sounded like.
It's misleading to think of technologies as "improving" life; they change the conditions of it, and then it's up to people living in these new conditions to decide whether their lives are good are not. Those with different values will experience a given technological revolution differently. But I do think it's possible to reach a societal consensus about what, overall, we want or do not want our lives to look like. As I said in the article, we still haven't come to terms with the impact of electric light and its elimination of the natural end-of-day we all used to share.
I loved LoM, though I would rather live in Mordor, personally. I need as much grounding in that "real world" as possible, and have to touch-grass 6X a day to ward off depression.
The biggest tech changes are SO big, you kind of can't see them. Suddenly you're just in a forest, where did the trees come from.
Cars:
https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/cars-have-fucked-up-this-country
Antibiotics. Water treatment. Crop rotation and new crops, tripling English food production in the 1600s. (That comes from "The Day the Universe Changed" and the title is your thesis, writ even more forcefully.)
But not every technology makes much difference, not that adopted! E-reading peaked ages ago at 20% of book sales - mostly to old(!) people who want the variable fonts.
Here's the biggie, though. I spent an hour trying to come up with a tech that really had been flatly forbidden, because it somehow would change the world for the better, but for the worse of those currently in charge, a real smoking-gun. (Enshittification is controlling HOW a tech was used, not forbidding digital content transmission, so not an example.)
It was really hard: we do seem to have a free-enough society that the only examples I could think of were posited as direct threats to citizens, needing protection: drones above your house got illegal fast. Psychedelics and other drugs, sometimes banned entirely as "no medical purpose", but with at least a fig-leaf claim of danger.
The perfect example is the family of contraceptive and abortion technologies. Contraceptives have been illegal at times for ages, and we all know about abortion, even after the technology for it became safer than giving birth. It's today's headlines, where the banning of a "family" of technologies that all allow women to control their own fertility, are to be banned entirely.
And we call this issue of banning a technological family the #1 central issue in a, wait for it:
Culture War.
What culture will we have? The old one where women are controlled by their biology, or where they have their biology under control? Those are two radically different cultures.
True, X is a product. The technology is the engagement algorithm. For example, I suspect Mastodon is still easy to connect to in Brazil. It's essentially the same product, but the algorithm is different. This makes all the difference in how it affects people. --Of course, there are nuances here, and lacking a rigorous definition of "technology" my argument is always going to be a little loose.
I have remind readers that Brazil didn't set out to ban Twitter as a platform, but rather certain accounts that the court found were spreading disinformation. It only ended up as a platform ban because Musk refused and systematically evaded enforcement. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg41n533zno
In other words, they were attempting to moderate the effects of this technology, but those operating it refused, which they were able to do because they largely resided abroad. It's very much an issue specific to the Internet; most technologies are easier to control, if the political will is there.
Yes and no. In Canada we have a pervasive problem with smuggled guns coming from the U.S. We may have sane gun laws here, but the lack of those south of the border means there's a dangerous spillover effect. In general though I agree that the Internet creates an environment that's much harder to control. A good book on this subject is "The Myth of The Good Corporate Citizen" by Murray Dobbin.
I work in a field that uses the backwards ancestor of ai image generation: image recognition. We scan lots of product looking for flaws, save all the images, and bring certain flaws to the attention to humans. Like me. Well, that's not the only thing I do, so if that gets improved I'll spend time doing other things. It's a slowly shifting job with slowly shifting product it seems. Held back by all this... matter in the manufacuring.
I have such a morlock mindset that I wonder what the life is like for those who maintain the tech locks, is that touched on in Lady of Mazes?
Fascinating. The pace of change of technologies is one thing we should try to control. To answer your question, I always figured that the tech locks maintain themselves, in the manner of much of the AI in the book. There are founders for many manifolds, such as Maren Ellis, who presumably curate for their logic and contents.
Well, the progress that makes things with new features need new tooling machines to make, also means the old tooling machines get used for different product. Actually making wealth to keep up with what people want has been a bottleneck for so long... I can see the 'move fast and break things' way is kinda like eating unhealthy amounts of food because our instincts are based on starvation more than heart health.
Sousa was both right and wrong. It's true the oral aural culture he championed has been massively impacted by the growth of civilization. At the same time, his band (he naturally refused to conduct for recordings) made quite a number of records in its time, which is, as for many artists of that time, the only way we can know now what they sounded like.
It's misleading to think of technologies as "improving" life; they change the conditions of it, and then it's up to people living in these new conditions to decide whether their lives are good are not. Those with different values will experience a given technological revolution differently. But I do think it's possible to reach a societal consensus about what, overall, we want or do not want our lives to look like. As I said in the article, we still haven't come to terms with the impact of electric light and its elimination of the natural end-of-day we all used to share.