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Waterluvianyesterday at 5:00 PM2 repliesview on HN

I think a lot of it depends on personal opinions on what society should be like being treated like objective truths.


Replies

anon84873628yesterday at 5:57 PM

Yes exactly. Let's simplify it to the individualist vs collectivist spectrum.

Cars became a self-reinforcing driver of individualism, especially in net new geographies. The negative effects are resisted better in societies/regions that were built long before them. (For both the cultural reasons and plain physical reasons, like not having wide enough roads).

In the car centric places, a few generations later they become an indelible aspect of nature. It is impossible for most people to imagine society working otherwise. And even when they do, the collective action problems are near insurmountable. The introduction of technology has irreversibly trapped us in a way of thinking we can't escape.

This is exactly the premise of the Amish religion. You must strictly control technology to create the society you want, not the other way around.

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Barrin92yesterday at 7:11 PM

>personal opinions on what society should be like

Anyone who still even has a personal opinion at all pertaining to what the world should look like distinct from swallowing whatever 'the market' has decided to impose on them is worth listening to.

That's the most interesting thing about the situation of technology today. Most technology is banal, what's notable is that apparently now a culture needs to be in possession of 'objective truth' (no such thing exists) to defend what is, by definition, a subjective way of life.