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Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster
(www.asomo.co)
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this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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That article's perspective sucks IMO. It is not the technology that is the problem in this case. The distance traveled to the meadow on foot versus the suburbs in the car had nothing to do with the technology or lack thereof. The person decided this was the normal they wanted and where they chose to live.
The fact is that this is cultural. You're willing to work a job that is an hour's drive away because you choose to take the job.
The one constant with technology is specialization. Things are going to increase in complexity unless civilization collapses. When noticeable shifts happen like with AI, many people groan at the additional burden of change. This has always and will always be the case, especially for people that are overworked and their livelihood put at risk from a technology they do not understand and struggle to learn. AI is especially troublesome because it is extremely complex and difficult to understand just under the surface of the near useless subscription services and basic publicly accessible tools.
Ultimately, the issue is cultural. You must stop working for free and stop treating corporate social media like a form of self promotion. I expect my job description to contractually state what my responsibilities are. If I answer phone calls for anything off the clock, I have a two hour minimum pay for my time. This culture of responsibility without compensation is a massive problem, as is acceptance of "it's just the way things are" mentality. Unplug from all corporate nonsense and think for yourself. Then push others to do the same. Only take a job that is close by, or move. Find a better job and don't accept abuse. It is a cultural problem.
Often it's a bit difficult to make an abstract point out of examples. You seem to be countering those examples with today's zeitgeist, the exact thing the article is looking to counter.
This would be true if all else were equal, but it isn't. Society built roads. It had to tear down housing to build the roads. The house prices went up because corporations bought up the housing stock and are using it to manipulate rents. None of that was the "choice" of the farmer. One cannot just opt out. "oh no thanks. I'll just take efficient public transport and we can just rip up the road network. Just give me one of the houses we build through more dense development."
Why? Many folks today are talking about making society resilient over efficient, with respect to COVID and supply chains. This is a direct ask for reducing complexity. The 15 minute city is an ask to reduce complexity. Complex societies fail.
The issue is hegemony. Every company claiming to benefit you are building a fiefdom and you are the bricks. You can work around it but you have to beat the products and services you buy into submission. This is true of phones, computers, cars, TVs, subscriptions, AI, and increasingly how it asks more and more of us. People say "the things we own end up owning us" but no one says that about a fridge, or a washing machine.
The world without complexity was only able to feed around 2 billion humans. To suggest that the complexity supporting the modern world is unwanted or unneeded is to kill 6 billion people.
Are you an advocate for authoritarianism and the death of 6 billion humans to achieve the simplicity of the past? The vast majority of goods and trade are for food and the raw materials of life produced in the largest and only areas of the planet capable of sustaining this population.
Bold claim. Why do you think complexity itself can improve efficiency? I can easily tank efficiency by adding complexity. Complexity also necessarily destroys resilience. Every time we've tried adding complexity, all of those societies disappear, from ancient Egypt to Rome to the Incans.
::: spoiler Logistics is complexity in action.
Supporting infrastructure is equally complex. It was the consolidation of so many industries into a global supply chain that only has a few players that makes the present cost effective. The forces at play are far greater than you realize in scope and scale. Your pitching a post civilization dystopia of death and misery. It's bearings, chemistry, metallurgy, medicine, the list goes on and on.
The future you want will exist a long time from now, but not in the way you imagine it. Biology is the ultimate technology. It is where we are headed a millennia from now. Once the age of scientific discovery is long past and science is nothing more than an engineering corpus, a complete mastery of biology will mean we can create ecosystems with all life and technology existing within elemental cycles balance. At that point, human life will likely simplify in many ways and evolve in others.
Simplification is always regressive and backwards. When complexity seems insurmountable, the solution is to refine and reform. In science, eliminate all the ridiculous names associated. It's not Maxwell's equations; they are the magnetic equations. Reform stupid conventions like using the term light speed to mean the speed of causality. We need massive educational reform at all levels accounting for the wellbeing of career educators while also modernizing to account for video recording technology. We need to make housing a fundamental unalienable human right and the exploitation of survival needs like food and housing should have massive consequences.
But no, pushing against complexity is nonsense. It shows you're naive of the use cases. I recommend you start daily watching Anton Petrov on YT or Odyssey. He covers a white paper research summary daily. You'll learn many applications of technology and this complexity. Watch Frazier Cain for more depth on present astronomy, and watch Isaac Arthur for a view of what a distant future might look like. Read Asimov's books like The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun to see a glimpse of a realistic future.
I know it's a turn of phrase but you don't know me. I realise the scope and scale of how the world works, thanks.
You're assuming a lot given what I've said. It's not an "in effect" thing either. You talk about actual systems in a way which invokes Gandalf magic when they work like Penn and Teller magic. You assume the article and any defense of it is naive, but you're missing the simple reality that sometimes you can simply remove huge amounts of complexity and get a better result.
The internet, for example, is not magic. There were several competing communication protocols, from circuit switched systems to fax to pagers. The internet is able to do all of those jobs, and it is a simpler system than the ones which existed in the past. It moved some complexity around, and therefore removed a bunch of complexity which was unnecessary.
This increase in simplicity is also called the second industrial revolution.
Perhaps you prefer the term decomplecting? Complexity is an overloaded term, but you literally follow up "simplification as a regressive thing" with a bunch of simplification which is effective. Since we are sharing reading lists, perhaps a bit of Dr Fatima and Think that Through on Youtube might help you. It's clear you do not understand the article nor my points.
Have you considered that culture is merely the collective reaction of a group of humans to a given set of environmental conditions? I don't disagree with you, but you're needlessly simplifying the problem.
Why did I choose to take the job? One major reason is that I have an automobile. If I didn't have the automobile, I wouldn't have been able to take the job. Culture comes about as a result of a series of incentives and motivations that shape human decisions. Change the access to technology, and you would change the culture.
You seem to believe that a solution will come from people simply choosing not to do certain things. This is partially true, but its more accurate to recognize that you need to first create the material conditions that enable people to actually have a viable choice.
It's the combination of the technology and the social structures that continually reproduce the culture that you're complaining about. If you think the culture is going to magically change without altering the material conditions first, you're gonna have a bad time.
To me, culture has more scope. If people refused to waste two hours a day commuting by the mental health disorder of the automobile, we would likely reshape zoning and housing to accommodate the population density required. This is longer term generational culture. It is hard for any of us to take the reigns of such a large scope. Ultimately the comprehensibility is irrelevant to the fact each of us only has one voting wallet. You either accept the way things are or you do not. Only you can change the culture you accept and live within. No one is born into an idealized circumstance that enables them. If you want the democratic freedoms of France you need to build and use a guillotine first. The people that do such a thing were not born into it. I'm not inciting violence. I am citing the magnitude of measurable change. No one is gong to make it easy for you. In this world people will exploit you in every way you are only barely willing to withstand. Ultimately it is impossible to set the bar of how much exploitation and abuse a population can or will withstand. That is not how society works. Governments do the minimum required to satisfy your collective community expectations enough to maintain power only. This minimum governance also involves letting business push people ad far as they can get away with before angering enough people of the wrong class to become a problem. Ultimately, you are the one that decides when to become a problem that gets attention in one way or another. You might try to become the person in power that does the minimum or you might take other avenues. However, your first and easiest vote is with your wallet. If you commit at this level, you will then feel far more motivated and vocal about the changes needed to create an acceptable culture you want to be a part of. You can't expect anyone to create a better world for you if you're not looking for one in the first place. The status que is the level of acceptable abuse with that bar set by others. You can't accept that bar if you want more or anything better.
Yeah sure, I can get on board with that. I just wrote a great 500 word response that I canceled accidentally. Fml I'm too tired, I'll try to give a quick summary.
Basically, by framing it as a cultural issue that hinges on the decisions of individuals to reject the dominant culture, you're putting the focus in the wrong direction. You're essentially trying to change human nature, instead of trying to change the specific conditions that cause humans to behave this way at this specific point in time. Fighting aggressively against the entrenched cultural realities is brave but futile.
Instead of focusing on dismantling the culture that is already firmly in place, you need to change the conditions for future generations so they can have the opportunity to develop less problematic cultures. In order to do that, you need to analyze the dominant culture and understand it, but you don't necessarily need to waste all your energy fighting its manifestations. Instead, you simply try to create spaces where people can construct subcultures which are protected from the dominant culture. Eventually, if the newer cultures prove to be elegant solutions to universal human problems, they will inevitably take over.
But again, I understand and agree with what you're saying. It just only applies to a handful of people who are inherently revolutionary in mindset. For the vast majority of humans, they don't have the ability to consciously and independently reject and disentangle from the dominant culture. Thus, the ultimate solution lies in altering the material conditions of society such that the dominant culture begins to change from the inside out.
::: spoiler I understand the frustration. Sorry it got lost. No hurry, and reply any time or not at all. It's all good.
I come from growing up as a Jehovah's Witness. (Atheist now). I'm intimately familiar with the blindness of belief systems and how futile they are to fight against. The best way to counter them is by example and drawing people into asking their own questions. Often we need to tell them the questions to ask in such a way that they feel as though they constructed the questions you lead them to ask. Any other form of opposition becomes a fruitless partisan opposition as a foreigner. I'm physically disabled now and my survival pivots on my understanding of this dynamic. This is not hyperbolic.
It is from this perspective that I say, you can't fix stupid in anyone else. You can only fix yourself and show others what life is like when you do not conform. Like, I rode a bike everywhere until I lost 160 pounds. Several friends and family started riding bikes as a result. I can do anything on Linux and it has caused others to question and try it. I never watch ads for anything and have no subscriptions of any kind, and yet I watch interesting edutainment. Few people understand or are willing to setup a network like mine but still find it interesting that it is possible to live without corporate influences or intrusion, especially when I have no desire to make frivolous purchases like nearly anyone on corporate social media. I think for myself because I am disconnected and that seems to be rare in the present world. I tend to be both a realist and a hopeful futurist.
The way I see it, you don't make change through authoritarianism or pocket isolationism. You'll never win the world through a partisan operation or mindset. At best you might win half, but even then, the game is already rigged by the last person that played this hand generations ago. You make real change by living it, talking about it, and making it cool. You've got to post and talk about upcycling, about the benefits of riding a bike, about reusing electronics and hacking around, you talk about how you make food without commercial recipes, your fermentation experiments without buying anything, your balcony or window seal gardening with seeds from you food refuse. If you post and talk about these things, you motivate yourself and others to change. When everyone whines at work about their commute, you tell them how great your 6 mile route down the beach was this morning and how there wasn't a person anywhere around, or you tell them about the mediative value of the hour and forty five minutes it took you to ride 33 miles like you've done for the last two years. You might be surprised at how often you find your coworkers joining you on those rides to work as you pass by their merging path from home, I certainly was for those two years before I got a better job closer to my home.
Fighting them only makes you the enemy or opposition, and oppose you they will. If you want to make change, you must show people what is possible, lead by example, travel the harder path but do it in style or just your style. This is my style. The only more direct and effective path is to get a law degree and get into political office... IMO
Ultimately, we are likely on the brink of major change in the next few decades. I think the big one will actually be from M-type asteroid mining. A single object is likely to hold more mineral wealth than everything humanity has accessed since the Holocene began. Dwarfing the wealth of the world will have massive consequences. Earth's resource scarcities are due to gravitational differentiation (all heavy elements sunk in the center of Earth when it was fully molten). Accessing the core of a differentiated body in near Earth orbit will drive humanity into space in an unprecedented shift of exponential growth and geopolitical upheaval. Wealth disparity will be massive, but the focused pressure and exploration will shift away from the general population. We will just be stuck with the aftermath of the climate change caused by space men. It is likely to be about how the 1920's were still an era of bicycles steam trains and horse carriages while the 1930's was the sudden era of the automobile for only slightly above average people. The 2030's will be the beginning of the space economy and mining colony. It is a much less hyped aspect of the current push into space, but it is the primary unspoken objective if you read between the lines, especially at what Japan has been doing to explore space mining and prospecting... but that is just my big picture hunch about where things are going and why billionaires are kinda acting like doomsday prepers in private and in business... It's probably a good time to build agrarian skills too tho
No it's not. Iceland has a 4-days work-week, average annual working hours in Germany are 1.3k, in France 1.5k, in the US 1.7k
This is like if France had a 4.5-days work-week and Germany a 4-days work-week. Are those countries lacking the level of technological advancement that US has?
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_annual_labor_hours
The set of environmental conditions is different in each country, and indeed for each individual human. The level of technological advancement only comprises a small piece of that picture.
Because of the recent rapid technological advances in the past century, essentially every society worldwide is struggling to adapt to the new technological landscape. But due to all of the other contributing factors, the struggle is slightly different for everyone.
Just looking at the average work hours is a miniscule people of the puzzle. How much money are people making in exchange for their time? Do they have to pay for Healthcare? What types of jobs are most common? What is the historical context of the population that has led them to this point? Were they working more or less 100 years ago? Did they have more wealth 100 years ago? What is the current rate of mental illness and disability? What is the historical and current prevalence of religion?
You could continue with questions in this vein more or less infinitely. And the answer to each question would vary substantially depending on the nation/community/individual that you chose to focus on. And each answer would potentially have an impact when trying to analyze how the current culture came about.
To answer your single hypothetical question, I think one of the primary contributing factors to the reduced working hours for many wealthy western European countries when compared to the US is the relative level of financial and social inequality along with the taxation rate. For France et all, the tax rate is significantly higher and the level of social support is correspondingly higher.
This reduces some of the necessity of working more hours, because the variability of income is reduced. If low-income people still make enough money and have enough benefits to make a decent life, they don't need to work so many hours just to survive. Also, high-income people will have a reduced incentive to work so many hours because the overall financial benefit is relatively smaller when compared to the US where you can avoid taxation to a much greater extent.
Exactly. The author checks his mails at breakfast, promotes himself on insta while on vacation and works overtime. While folks in Europe try a 4-days work-week. The author clearly fails to recognize a cultural problem.