Comment by Levitz
1 month ago
>There has never been a utopian past and there will never be a utopian future.
I wouldn't call it utopian, but I'd say we are way past "peak democracy" at this point.
There was a time in which corporations did get broken up when too large, when we did understand that it's about serving the population first and accumulating wealth after that, when corporations influencing politics was widely seen as a negative. It does seem to me we are now way past that.
There's no reason why democracy can't peak again and reach new heights. But that won't happen automatically.
Personally I think there are technological preconditions for stable democracy that have recently been countered by authoritarian leaning technology. We need to invent counter technology to those things.
There is no authoritarian leaning technology. People figured out how to create 1984 while saying they defend free speech.
It is simply that, eventually, people learn how to use technology to their advantage.
I agree with this. And yet.
> It is simply that, eventually, people learn how to use technology to their advantage.
What should we call this accumulation of lessons in how to do things for your benefit? It can be and is encoded as algorithms is it not?
There is a small community of billionaires who control everything to the best of their ability. They control for their own benefit.
Technology, its development and production, is one thing that they control.
The rest of the population (the nonbillionaires) is another thing that they seek to control. It's near the top of their list.
Phones, internet and social media are tools for controlling us. Arguably. Right?
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I disagree that there's a technological solution to late stage capitalism and the slow death of liberal democracy.
New technology doesn't change anything about social institutions - the most powerful groups before the technology was invented simply own the technology after it's invented and use it to further cement their power.
I think the luddites were on to something. We don't need technology, we need humans doing things a little differently, maybe even doing bizarre things like setting factories on fire. Personally I hope we can try other things before setting factories on fire, see Keith McHenry's version of The Anarchist Cookbook for peaceful resistance solutions as well.
The point is though without a restructure, new technology doesn't liberate, in fact it further entrenches existing power structures.
> New technology doesn't change anything about social institutions
This is of course demonstrably untrue. Marshall McLuhan devoted his life to illuminating how technology changes society. The printing press, radio, television and the Internet have all undoubtedly changed our social institutions. It's hard to imagine secular democracy ever becoming a thing if we hadn't been able to mass produce books and newspapers, and writing manuscripts had remained mostly under the control of the Church. It seems less probable that the Nazis would have come to power if not for the immense skill Goebbels and Hitler had in the use of radio. And I doubt Trump would have been elected if he hadn't known how to press people's buttons so well on social media.
Let's not forget that more ancient things like fire, agriculture and accounting are also technology that irrevocably changed humanity and put new people in power. Or take a look at how railroads remade American society. Or how sufficiently advanced sailboats placed half the world under the thrall of colonialism...
Absolutely there can exist technologies which are anti-democracy, and surveillance technologies are exactly that. You become afraid to say or write the wrong thing in public, and then to say or write it in private, and then to even think it, and finally the thing is forgotten. I felt like Orwell made the point well enough in 1984.
All that said I don't see technology saving us from our current problems, it needs to be invented, it needs to mature, there needs to be adoption. One might imagine mesh networking and censorship proof distributed messaging or something having an influence on society but we simply aren't there yet.
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I think everyone would have a problem with the type of domination exhibited by Apple & Google, if they understood it.
There are many voters who are not well versed in tech. You can see this reflected in the kinds of politicians that win, and in the types of issues they are (and are not) fighting over.
It's up to us to make the issues clear and simple.
And when was this utopia in your opinion? This sounds like rosy retrospection to me.
Or are you talking about a very specific industry, because the thread sounds like it is all society or "Late capitalism" which I disagree with.
I don't believe there was any utopian period in the past, but in US history, the Gilded Age had a lot in common with our current day (corruption, centralization of wealth and power, stemming from new technologies). And it was followed by the Progressive era and then the New Deal which were distinctly more populist in nature. Those were the eras of American history where the US got serious about anti-trust and unionization respectively.