I would think any serious person worth their salt would take a luddite (by that I mean the values of the original bunch, not what the colloquialism has become) position and say that technology is as good as its implementation. If the technology makes it easier for people to do more in less time, thereby meaning that people can go do the fun stuff they enjoy doing, then absolutely. If, however, it’s implemented to drive down wages and therefore living standards, then it is not an advancement that we should seek to implement.
Saying the left is techno-pessimistic is, in my opinion, lazy.
Yupp, and that’s sadly a product of capitalism. For example, low load industrial robot arms with a default set of software can be bought extremely cheap nowadays. What the capitalist sees is not a robotic utopia, where people are freed from work and get to enjoy life more, but a labour force which is cheaper and more reliable than humans. They have no interest in making the world a better place. They just want to maximize profits.
Legislation worldwide is missing crucial time to find and enforce solutions for this.
Technology can be so beautiful, magical and immensely helpful to us. If we use it right. But given our current system, this is unfortunately barely the case.
What the left needs is a fucking spine.
Depends what you define as “a spine”
oh yeah what should they be doing?
We have solarpunk’s techno-realism though. It’s not a political party, that’s why many won’t see it. But it’s definitively there… like open source projects, hardware, fediverse, and so on.
FOSS-optimism
We do, it’s even got its own community.
We’re perfectly optimistic about most technology. We can see how we can benefit from it, once most of the value it produces no longer ends in the owner class’es pocket.
We can see how we can benefit from it, once most of the value it produces no longer ends in the owner class’es pocket.
Yup, indeed. Remember when social media was celebrated as what enabled bottom up revolution in the Middle East 1 ? Well, a lot of people forgot about that, since big brained profiteers realised they can commercial people’s personal data and sell them to entities that will weaponise the innate dark insecurities of the people to influence public policies.
1 I am aware that the Arab Spring largely failed, but so did the Revolutions of 1848. In spite of failures, I believe that the ideas have been planted and will be nurtured for future generations to reap. Even though the liberal revolutions failed in Europe, the liberal values they tried to champion are now in place in Europe. I believe the same will happen in the Middle East but it will take generations to materialise.
Edit: formatting
who the fuck is the liberal hell hole the guardian think it is to take part in leftist discourse
