The "modern technology is rubbish" trope is as old as humanity. I magine the inhabitants of Bronze Age villages said much the same thing when the first iron tools turned up: "yes, it's very hard and it keeps its edge, but it's not as pretty and you can't leave it out in the rain". Traditionally, there are two main strands to this: twilight and triviality. The former centres on the belief that the past was better, that novelty is risky and that progress is a delusion. The latter fears the decadence of the better sort, which might leave the patrimony unprotected from both external and internal threats. In the modern era, triviality has also extended to a belief that the mob are childlike and amoral in their enthusiasms. These two strands are respectively conservative and reactionary, even when voiced by disappointed liberals.
We Were Promised Jetpacks - Gary Kasparov: "In the 1960s young boys dreamed of becoming aerospace engineers, now they want to be financial engineers, working in investment companies, which are the most attractive spheres for talent" ...
On Novelty, Abundance and Destruction - The problem isn't the technology, it's the sci-fi. David Graeber yokes together technological disappointment and the current economic crisis ...
Enough with the Flying Cars, Where did the 15-hour Week Go? - Flying cars look futuristic, but they're part of a highly conservative worldview in which we still labour for 40 hours a week, the wife might work but is still primarily a "homemaker", and the kids get a high-quality education so they too can progress to full-time jobs ...
Toilet Humour - A critique of Robert Gordon's paper, Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts The Six Headwinds ...
Antisocial Media - The third industrial revolution (IT and comms) stimulated a counter-movement, but one that took a privatised form rather than a socialised one, in keeping with the ideological tide from the late 70s onwards. The chief feature of this has been the offsetting of whitecollar productivity gains through a combination of time-wasting and the creation of supernumerary roles ...
Technology, Stagnation and Drug Abuse - Techno-dammerung, trivialisation, and the eve of war meme ...
