Comment by 317070
9 hours ago
I have seen these parodies before, and while they are accurate in style, they seem to misunderstand or misrepresent Curtis' message. A message which is not that hard to understand, except that it falls comfortably outside of the Overton window:
"Driven by the seductive post-war fantasy that human beings and nature are self-regulating machines -- a cybernetic delusion shared equally by California tech-utopians, holistic ecologists, and free-market economists -- we willingly surrendered political power and moral responsibility to automated, network-driven systems, only to find ourselves trapped in a static, dehumanizing loop that cannot envision an alternative future and leaves the existing, unaccountable hierarchies of power completely intact."
No, I understand his message.
And again, this is exactly what I meant by "uncharitable nonsense to convince others that technocracy is unassailable." He regularly claims his job isn't to provide solutions or that solutions are increasingly unimaginable, yet that's the only thing that does matter.
If knowing more about how civilization got to this point suggests nothing to Curtis about how to escape from it and hasn't for three decades, despite his supposedly privileged epistemic position, why listen to him in the first place? The man obviously isn't interested in proposing or "raising awareness" of solutions, only problems.
I don't need another six hours explaining why I'm right to be dissatisfied. I already am. Tell me what you've learned that might make me less powerless, not more.