David, have you read Jacques Ellul, and if so, what critique do you have against his philosophy of technology? I am unconvinced that technology as it exists today is merely a tool that is used by people, and that people are or even could be in control of the direction in which it develops. What reasons do we have to believe that humanity can achieve these monumental transformations with technology, when we are unable to solve the current problems we face (global warming, overpopulation, famine, etc)?

Yes, in this scenario I was imagining that while the pill would give you immortality, you could still voluntarily die if you chose to.

Agreed.

Very interesting, thank you. My only additional thought was that population has increased dramatically, which allows for a broader distribution of labor. The question (for me at least) is, does the population increase necessitate more advanced technology, or does the advancement of technology necessitate the increase of population? My readings of Ellul have led me to wonder if the latter is the case.

Schopenhauer has persuasively shown that free will is an illusion in his essay, On the Freedom of the Will. His other essay, On the Basis of Morality, demonstrates that morality remains coherent despite behavior being determined.

Didn't people have a lot more free time back in the day? It seems like to me that the machines that we use in agriculture (etc) require a more complex society, with everyone working more. Or perhaps rather, just more people. Instead of most everyone working the fields, there is a minority of farmers who use equipment, which is manufactured in a factory the employs many people, which gets materials from other factories, etc.

Indirectly, yes.

Will automation render workers superfluous or irrelevant? — Bitter Crank

No. You will need even more workers to make sure the machines don't break. Or workers to make sure the machines that make sure the other machines don't break, don't break. As systems become more complex, the amount of effort required to maintain them tends to increase.

people can't even remember to use a condom but you want them to read the fine print of a legal document :lol:

Slowly but steadily, I have been working my way through Ellul's The Technological Society. This passage (among others) stood out:

Herein lies the inversion we are witnessing. Without exception in the course of history, technique belonged to a civilization and was merely a single element among a host of nontechnical activities. Today technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Certainly, technique is no longer the simple machine substitute for human labor. It has come to be the "intervention into the very substance not only of the inorganic but also of the organic."

Kant's Transcendental Idealism (1st ed), Henry Allison

I like this one a lot:

One cringes to hear scientists cooing over the universe or any part thereof like schoolgirls over-heated by their first crush. From the studies of Krafft-Ebbing onward, we know that it is possible to become excited about anything—from shins to shoehorns. But it would be nice if just one of these gushing eggheads would step back and, as a concession to objectivity, speak the truth: THERE IS NOTHING INNATELY IMPRESSIVE ABOUT THE UNIVERSE OR ANYTHING IN IT. — Ligotti

I think it's pretty impressive.

:up: Thanks!

What happened to @180 Proof's reply to me?

I got into dystopian literature at the end of 2020, which happened to include novels that I missed back in high school.

Read:

• The Road, Cormac McCarthy
• Lord of the Flies, William Golding
• Animal Farm, George Orwell
• Brave New World, Adlous Huxley
• 1984, George Orwell
• The Giver, Lois Lowry
• We, Yevgeny Zamyatin

Reading:

• Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

To-read:

• The Iron Heel, Jack London
• A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
• The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood

Suggestions for more dystopian reading is welcomed!

Perhaps a reason to remain alive is to see if there is any other reason to stay alive besides this.

Yep. I work in tech and have grown weary of a lot of it, mostly because of how I feel like a drop of water in an ocean. There is also just so much useless tech, so much energy wasted on complete rubbish. And of course the social and moral problems with privacy, security, corruption, etc.

Recently I have been reading a lot of philosophy of tech, like Ellul, Mumford and Kaczynski. Your post is a bit serendipitous in that regard. Tech has this nasty habit of introducing more problems than it solves. It has turned into this quasi-reality of its own, where the needs of technical progress are fulfilled despite the consequences this has on humans and the rest of the world. There is no alternative, it's just technology solving problems that were introduced by technology. Humans are clever but we sure aren't very wise.

My theory is people like leaders that act like dicks. They want an idiot boss that just rules by force of personality and not reasoned understanding. — schopenhauer1

From Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism:

I believe that the ideas that underlie fascist actions are best deduced from those actions, for some of them remain unstated and implicit in fascist public language. Many of them belong more to the realm of visceral feelings than to the realm of reasoned propositions. In chapter 2 I called them "mobilizing passions":

• a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;
• the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and to the subordination of the individual to it;
• the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limit, against its enemies, both internal and external;
• dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
• the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
• the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group's historical destiny;
• the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason;
• the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group's success;
• the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

lol

Found a copy of Strayer's On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, thanks for the rec.

Also picked up Man and Technics by Oswald Spengler and A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright.

Have any of you guys read any real fascist work? — Bertoldo

oh yeah, i read the Futurist manifesto...it was batshit retarded

Technopoly, Neil Postman

I've always presumed, maybe incorrectly, that states were a consequence of increase of population size and density, and the need for specialisation that creates. If you're are relatively small group of people, you don't need and can't really afford someone who occupies himself solely with ruling. — ChatteringMonkey

I don't think that is necessarily incorrect, though I am not an expert. From what I have read it seems as though states are inherently based exclusively on sedentary agriculture (and imports for anything else not available).

The domestication of humans in cities resulted in "de-skilling" them. Instead of knowing numerous ways to to hunt, gather, swidden, harvest, fish, etc, humans know how to do only a handful of things, how to raise only a few crops (wheat, millet, rice, oats - the cereals), and raise only a few animals (pigs, cows, sheep, etc).

If for environmental conditions (or whatever) you find yourself exclusively relying upon sedentary agricultural practices amongst many other people, I think you will need something like a state to keep things organized.

Agriculture requires a lot more intensive and extensive cooperative labor than hunting and gathering. The cycles of nature produced sufficient food for hunting and gathering. Both lifestyles require sharp intellectual skills, and the skills of finding appropriate foods in the wild must have prepared people to succeed at agriculture. They had to be skilled botanists to find food plants and avoid poisoning themselves. — Bitter Crank

I'm not sure if I would 100% agree with this. Hunter-gatherer societies were characterized by sharp spikes of very intense and coordinated work, oftentimes revolving around seasonal animal migrations and the change of weather. They had to take advantage of the situation and they had to work as a team to succeed.

If you are relying exclusively upon agriculture to survive, then yeah I can see how that would require far more labor and cooperation than H/G. But H/Gs practiced limited agriculture too, and so do everyday modern people in their gardens. These modes of agriculture don't seem to require nearly as much effort of group coordination.

Surely only a really neurotic, unstable creature would give up what worked so well for something that they had to wait for, because of seasons and the nature of agriculture, over what was a “comparatively easier and healthy lifestyle”. Meaning that agriculture offered something better very quickly, which it can’t have. — Brett

Yeah, that's the real crazy question, why did they?

Agriculture-based states existed only in very specific environmental conditions; conditions that minimized how much work was needed for agriculture to work, and conditions that offered no other obvious alternative. Ancient Mesopotamian city-states were dependent on the flooding of the Tigris and the Euphrates to do a lot of the hard work for them (but certainly not all of it); it would be unimaginable to see a city-state in a different environment, like the mountains.

But even still, ancient Mesopotamia was not a desert, and there were plenty of other alternatives to agriculture nearby to the rivers at the time (unlike how the region is today, which is an arid desert). Many people were able to live outside of and independent of the states, and many tried to escape as well. If agriculture-based societies were an obvious benefit to anyone, why were the majority of humans living outside of them for the majority of human history, and why were so many people trying to escape?

The industrial revolution could not have happened without all the benefits that came from agricultural societies. The fact that H/G societies never changed right into the 20th century is testament to that. — Brett

Perhaps H/Gs never changed because they never felt the need to :smile:

Centralized agricultural states came and went frequently for the majority of human history. "Empires" looked impressively unified on paper, but were much more porous in reality. Industrial technology allowed humans to conquer the natural work into submission; fast and long-distance travel and communication allowed for unprecedented levels of control. Nowadays states are ubiquitous, but they certainly could not exist without this modern tech.

But it must have been a good deal for the majority to begin with at least, right? Otherwise the whole thing wouldn't have gotten off the ground.

So perhaps the story is something like: scarcity causes cooperative agriculturalisation (motivated by well-grounded anxiety about survival without it). But at some point, given the low and declining feasibility of exit, and the division of labour, dominance hierarchies take hold. This is self-reinforcing: political-material inequality locks in because the growing surplus is unevenly allocated according to the hierarchy, and this enables further coercion, which further increases inequality, etc.

Does that sound right? — Welkin Rogue

Yeah I think that could be a reasonable story of how it all happened. It's hard to say because at this point we are just speculating. I'm sure there were probably several different conditions in which early states would emerge and this one could be one of them.

The common narrative is that states inevitably come after agriculture, and that agriculture-based societies are inherently better than hunter-gatherer nomadic societies. We know now that hunter-gathering, swiddening, pastoralism and the like are comparatively easier and healthier lifestyles. And we also know that agriculture existed for thousands of years before the first states emerged. Furthermore we now know that there are serious problems associated with life in an agricultural state (problems that either do not exist or are much less severe in hunter-gatherer life), and that people frequently tried to run away from the domus. So it's not at all obvious that the agricultural state was an improvement on the conditions of the average person.

The interesting question to me is how and why states developed, given all of these disadvantages. I think at least part of the answer is to see the agricultural society as a population machine, which aims at producing domesticated humans; humans that cannot survive on their own and depend on the state to survive and so therefore maintain it.

But it worked. Unless you disagree with what we have as a consequence. — Brett

Well, it worked eventually, but only once industrial technology was invented, which facilitated fast and reliable long-distance travel and communication. Before the Industrial Revolution, and especially in the early days, states were rising and falling all the time.

Against The Current — Bitter Crank

Could you give me a link to this book? I'm interested, and also lots of what I said in this thread comes from a similarly-titled book, Against the Grain.

I don’t think complete dependence on agriculture increased the risk of starvation. I would say the opposite, otherwise it wouldn’t have thrived. Mismanagement might contribute to starvation. — Brett

Completely depending on a single method for obtaining sustenance is extremely risky because it is putting all your eggs in one basket. If you are a Neolithic slave farmer, and the crop yield is lower than expected, you are fucked because the state will take everything and leave you with nothing. The state exists to perpetuate itself; it ensures the health and safety of its citizens only when convenient and necessary.

I think it's more that an agricultural lifestyle enabled state coercion than that state coercion created the agricultural lifestyle. If you didn't need agriculture, if you could just walk away from an abusive society and live comfortably in the wilderness with no loss to yourself, the state would be powerless over you. — Pfhorrest

You are correct when you say that agriculture enables states. States are agricultural-based. And they did not create agriculture, because agriculture was around for several thousand years before the first states.

Contrary to your point about walking away, though, the historical evidence we have actually shows that people running away from early states was a serious problem for these states. Malnourishment, epidemics, heavy taxes, slavery, wars, back-breaking and onerous labor, inequality, hierarchies, all of this stuff is what you find in states. People had no good reason to stay and so they frequently took flight. The prestige of a state was reflected not so much in how much land it had but in how big their population was. Cities built walls not just to keep enemies out, but to keep the residents in.

And if you are raised in a state, you are basically domesticated and so you don't really know how else to live outside of the conditions of the state. If all you know is farming, then even if there are plenty of other resources available from different methods, you are out of luck.

Humans were practicing agriculture for four to five thousand years prior to the emergence of the first city states in ancient Mesopotamia. Agriculture was but one of many different methods that humans used to get their food. Generally agriculture takes far more effort than other methods of obtaining food though, so it was practiced on-and-off, whenever the situation called for it.

Probably environmental shifts and the gradual decline in the fauna due to over-hunting led to mass gatherings near floodplains, like the Tigris and Euphrates. Over time, small, short-lived city states popped up here and there, completely dependent on agriculture as a means of sustenance. This was a very risky gamble, because with this came things like deadly epidemics, malnourishment, oppressive chattel slavery and raids from opportunistic nomads.

These early states had to constantly replenish their populations not just from those who died but also from those who ran away. Wars were fought not really for land as much as for people to enslave, and women were incentivized to have many children.

Generally speaking the nomadic life was superior in almost every respect to the civilized life. Because of all this, early states frequently came and went. They were little anomalies in specific environmental conditions, based on a unstable source of food and brutal social oppression.

So to react to your original post, early agricultural states were not based on an anxiety about the future and risk-aversion. Complete dependence on agriculture increased the risk of starvation. There was no good reason for anyone working the fields to be doing that, apart from coercion by the state.

Good job with pardoning these fucks

Re-reading Every Cradle Is a Grave, Sarah Perry.

any number can be conceived — RogueAI

Can it?

If a dedicated category cannot be made, under which category should I put discussions about philosophy of technology?

Been a great book so far, I am nearly finished with it after a relaxing weekend of reading. Definitely a re-read.

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, James C. Scott.

Excited for this one :party:

Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford

I'm planning on making a thread on his ideas to help determine just that.

Yeah, I also doubt his intentions were purely motivated by ideological beliefs about the dangers of technology. Like you said, fifteen years is a long time to go without any explanation as to why the attacks are happening.

Eric Hoffer (whom Kaczynski occasionally references) said that people turn into fanatics in order to justify atrocities that they have committed. The devotion of a fanatic is often an attempt to silence feelings of guilt. Deeper and deeper they go. Hoffer thinks there are three types of people in a social revolution: men of letters, fanatics and men of practical action (appearing in that order temporally). I think Kaczynski might be considered to be both a man of letters and a fanatic.

Regardless, I don't see much use in focusing on his actions. It's his ideas that really matter. Use what you can, and compost the rest.

Like I said, it's complicated, probably one of the toughest issues that one thinks about when reading his works. I think violence can be justified, sometimes it's the only option. But retaliating by striking out against random people who are related, even just barely, to modern industrial technology, and who otherwise are innocent, is cruel and frighteningly ruthless. K claims it was meant to draw attention to his ideas, but who knows how sincere he is when he says that. And maybe all it ended up doing was make people scared, and cling even more tightly to technology and the state.

The mountains of Western Montana offered me nearly everything I needed or wanted. If those mountains could have remained just as they were when I first moved to Montana in 1971, I would have been satisfied. The rest of the world could have had a herd mentality, or an individualistic mentality or whatever, and it would have been all the same to me. But, of course, under modern conditions there was no way the mountains could have remained isolated from the rest of the world. Civilization moved in and squeezed me, so... — Kaczynski, Technological Slavery

It's complicated. K definitely has a twisted streak (e.g. his journal entries expressing glee when he learned his bombs had killed people). Yet his ideas are remarkable, and the intensity of his presentation is quite honestly breathtaking at times. It is a shame that he did his bombings; while he claims to not feel remorse and believes it to have been necessary, I think the world could have benefited more from his writings if he were not in prison. And despite his crimes, for a man so devoted to human autonomy, it is somewhat tragic (or ironic) that he is behind bars.