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To be clear I'm not only picking on conservatives here. I know right-wingers tend to deny client change, but there are plenty of liberals who are anti-science as well. There are a lot of people on the left who are anti-vaccine, etc...
Anti-vaxxers are a small fringe group in any case. Per CDC data, religious and philosophical reasons for exemptions dwarf medical or scientific reasons. Trying to claim that all the nutcases in Oregon are "on the left" simply because the state's politics tend to run blue is a bit silly.
Gone are the days where you can earn a decent living fresh out of high school unless you join the military.
Even the military has gone high tech! Read Wired For War/The Robotics Revolution and Conflict In the 21st Century/PW Singer and you'll see! Air Force cadets already known the may never fly a military jet, as they may be behind a computer screen directing unmanned spacecraft, like drones.
The Army, Navy are also following suit. They even have a Robot Hospital in Iraq to repair damaged robots, and someone straight out of high school will need the skills to repair them.
Ted was acting alone, and that counts for something when people are attempting to tie his "work" to the notion of millions of "silent" supporters. While technological advancements have yielded some great stuff it has undeniably displaced far more workers than any amount of offshoring of US labor ever accomplished. The realization of what the term "machine age" really connotes is still far beyond the imagination of those who insist on believing that all this displacement can be offset by---more technology.
Counting the displaced and including those who never even got a job to be displaced from, we can easily see the problem with our current domestic labor policy, or lacking of it. Luddites? No, probably not, but give em some video gaming, a little weed, you know, the old bread and circuses thing and all will be well again. Pacifying that army of the displaced will be no easy task to accomplish over time. Eventually I can see a time when the anger of a new generation of the economically marginalized decides to turn off their TV's and smash stuff, and in that exercise they are made to feel a bit powerful for once.
I am nowhere near anti technology. My job involves working in high tech. We seem to have moved well past the point where technology is a useful tool, to where we have become dependent on it in every day life.
If wifi is not available, some people go into withdrawal. Tech failures affects the way people have to work sometimes.
Communications is important in my line of work. I have had a cell phone since the first hard case mounted in the trunk, at my own expense. I used that to help get business for my company early on. In the early days, the company wouldn't even reimburse for using your own cell phone. They have completely gone 180 degrees on that. They have the capability to track my movements with the company provided cell phones they now supply. They say they aren't "presently" doing that, but if they have or plan to change that policy, would they tell us? I will be retiring soon, and when I do, I will probably scale back on my use of technology, even on a personal level. People who have not embraced technology, are seldom victimized by stolen identity. Those that have embraced it have to be ever vigilant. Those that have been around a long time, can remember what life was like when you didn't have to worry about such things.
Having to worry about identity-theft is a very different thing from having to worry about being vaporized in a nuclear explosion. Those who have been around for a long time can remember what life was like when you had that sort of thing hanging around your neck.
There has never been time when there were not things that people needed to worry about. Some coped a little better than others, and that is still true.
Having to worry about identity-theft is a very different thing from having to worry about being vaporized in a nuclear explosion. Those who have been around for a long time can remember what life was like when you had that sort of thing hanging around your neck.
There has never been time when there were not things that people needed to worry about. Some coped a little better than others, and that is still true.
I worry more about surviving a nuclear war, than I do being vaporized. If we did get into an all out nuclear war, I would even prefer to be gone in a flash.
The Luddites were protestors who were sabateurs, while the Unibomber was a philosopher who was a terrorist. Although they were addressing similar concerns, their nature and actions were very different.
That said, I do think we may see a bit of both in the coming decades, but another third movement may appear. This would be self-sustaining communal groups who buy land and live like Amish-lite. Not necessarily rejectors of technology, per se, but people who want to acheive their basic needs of food, water, and basic material goods (housing, furniture, etc.) outside of the main economy which will not be able to provide adequate occupations for a large portion of the population.
These groups may draw their population from such diverse peoples as survivalists, hippies/greens, general rural populations, permaculture/gardening enthusiasts, and other subcultures.
The Luddites were protestors who were sabateurs, while the Unibomber was a philosopher who was a terrorist. Although they were addressing similar concerns, their nature and actions were very different.
That said, I do think we may see a bit of both in the coming decades, but another third movement may appear. This would be self-sustaining communal groups who buy land and live like Amish-lite. Not necessarily rejectors of technology, per se, but people who want to acheive their basic needs of food, water, and basic material goods (housing, furniture, etc.) outside of the main economy which will not be able to provide adequate occupations for a large portion of the population.
These groups may draw their population from such diverse peoples as survivalists, hippies/greens, general rural populations, permaculture/gardening enthusiasts, and other subcultures.
And these groups would be the first places the bad guys would go to in a SHTF scenario. Until the food runs out anyway.
From the book Taming The Tiger/The Struggle To Control Technology by Witold Rybcynski:
"In 1559, Queen Elizabeth I of England refused to grant a royal patent for a knitting machine on the grounds that it would deprive too many of her subjects of employment."
"Charles II, acting in the same spirit, gave a charter to the hosiers' guild which would protect them against mechanization until the 19th century."
"In the 19th century, Belgian weavers took to "accidentally" dropping their heavy wooden clogs/sabots into the delicate mechanism of the loom, giving rise to the expression 'sabotage'."
So where are our Queen Elizabeth I's today or our Charles II's?
Technology does not threaten my existence, owners of the means of production use technology or whatever silly whimsical reason to deny me the means of survival. Society is built around the masses pleasing the whims of the owners of the technological means to secure individual (semi comfortable) existence. Technology per se is not a threat, but it will be increasingly more difficult to please the owning class having access to more technology. I read quite a few threads like this, people seems are mentally prepared to fight for a few remaining job openings or die trying without even thinking how insane the entire owner-slaves scheme is, people are mentally conditioned to believe that they have no intrinsic right to exist unless they are employed by the owner class, so yes, so far it is hopeless, but hunger and cold are great motivators to challenge status quos.
Kaczynski, on the other hand, believed that technology makes survival easy and thus it destroys human character evolved in the struggle to survive and dominate others. As a promising academician who turned into a reflexive recluse he never had to sell his arse on the labor market to live, thus his pov is somewhat lacking.
Of course, there are fundamental technological threats involving human engineering of desirable (by controlling elites) traits as well as "reality modification" technologies relying on conditioning and psychotropics to achieve sensations of docile wellbeing under less than optimal circumstances. That seems to be the future of the social control which would make snooping and political repressions obsolete.
On the positive side, I believe technological scares run against the time, the complex societies making technological advances possible are under accumulated pressure of many issues, big and small, making technological future less than certain.
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