alt Hacker News> New technology doesn't change anything about social institutions
This is of course demonstrably untrue. Marshall McLuhan devoted his life to illuminating how technology changes society. The printing press, radio, television and the Internet have all undoubtedly changed our social institutions. It's hard to imagine secular democracy ever becoming a thing if we hadn't been able to mass produce books and newspapers, and writing manuscripts had remained mostly under the control of the Church. It seems less probable that the Nazis would have come to power if not for the immense skill Goebbels and Hitler had in the use of radio. And I doubt Trump would have been elected if he hadn't known how to press people's buttons so well on social media.
Let's not forget that more ancient things like fire, agriculture and accounting are also technology that irrevocably changed humanity and put new people in power. Or take a look at how railroads remade American society. Or how sufficiently advanced sailboats placed half the world under the thrall of colonialism...
Absolutely there can exist technologies which are anti-democracy, and surveillance technologies are exactly that. You become afraid to say or write the wrong thing in public, and then to say or write it in private, and then to even think it, and finally the thing is forgotten. I felt like Orwell made the point well enough in 1984.
All that said I don't see technology saving us from our current problems, it needs to be invented, it needs to mature, there needs to be adoption. One might imagine mesh networking and censorship proof distributed messaging or something having an influence on society but we simply aren't there yet.
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>I felt like Orwell made the point well enough in 1984.
True enough. Although I think Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth came closer to our current situation with The Space Merchants[0] (which I just read, almost by accident).
Orwell was more explicit in his exposition of totalitarianism and told a more compelling story than Pohl/Kornbluth did in their tale of authoritarian/corporatist dystopia.
That said, the universe of The Space Merchants more closely matches the current environment, IMHO.
> You become afraid to say or write the wrong thing in public, and then to say or write it in private
It's called "social cooling": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363
> but we simply aren't there yet
Actually, I2P is already here. It should be promoted more.
I didn't use the right word, maybe you can help me pick a better one. You are of course correct that technology has many times completely changed our societies, but my point is that despite overwhelming transformations, the core of societal organization doesn't change: those with capital control those without. Those with capital determine what labor those without may do, when, where, and what becomes of the result of that labor.
The printing press resulted in the first ultrapowerful media companies that were able to capitalize on later revolutionary technologies such as radio and television (for those nimble enough to keep up with the times). Even in that era the newspaper was leveraged to serve the needs of the wealthy and solidify their power. Countless unpublished books that couldn't get picked up by the publishing houses. And the end game of those media technologies is Rupert Murdoch, Disney.
You are right, power shifted from the church to other Capital holders. And the laborers continued to labor at the whim of some new master.
Railroads led to Standard Oil and America's first ultra powerful monopolies, laying rail to serve their needs (or wasting rail to suck money from the government) rather than the needs of the people.
Sailboats created the East Indian trading company and actual corpotocracies, as you said.
Incredible changes to society in so many ways except perhaps the most important, and that's my point: it won't be technology in the end. It wasn't technology that led to the syndicalization of pre Franco Spain, or the revolutions in Russia and the ROC, or the development of the Paris commune, events that signify some of the few brief times in our history that the core paradigm was shifted if only briefly.