Very interesting topic and high-quality discussion, thanks for posting it Wilson.
For a very literal example of a society becoming a slave to technology you need look no further than China. As of next year the state run
social credit system, which already exists as a series of pilot programmes, goes into action fully. Every single Chinese citizen will be electronically ranked by the government on their obedience to the state. A high ranking will net you everything from access to exclusive hotel rooms and luxury taxis to priority treatment in hospitals. A low ranking, on the other hand, can lead to you being banned from buying property, travelling by train or plane, and have your kids kicked out of school.
Yes China will soon be a society where people will have to check the social rating app on their smartphones before they can buy property or travel. The stated goal is to "allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step."
Make no mistake that the building blocks exist to create this in the US and across the Western world as well. All you'd need to do is combine the records held by credit referencing agencies - which already take as much personal info as they can get and use machine learning algorithms to create a profile of absolutely everyone - with social media profiles, and boom, you would have a system virtually identical to China's social credit system.
The social credit system is so dystopian, I hope that it never reaches our shores. There is a really good episode of Black Mirror about this very thing.
At the same time, though, I sometimes wonder if these sorts of systems of social control (not specifically a social credit system, but any system of social control that places the value of the whole over the rights of the individual to be and act however they want) wouldn't be a good thing in the end. I was watching something about Singapore a while ago. In Singapore they enjoyed a peaceful and stable existence, there is very little crime, a high amount of safety, and a high standard of living. To accomplish this, they have very strict laws and harsh punishments for breaking those laws, and they do not allow as many personal freedoms as we enjoy. However, many people there say they are not interested in having more freedom, because they have peaceful and satisfying lives without many of the problems that face most of the world.
As a westerner through and through, I like being able to be who I am and do whatever I want (for the most part). But it is thought-provoking. A lot of the problems we face are from people doing whatever they want, and from people putting themselves above society as a whole in destructive ways. In some ways, successfully implementing a system to exert control over the behavior of a population is the point of society.
I'm playing devil's advocate... I'm not calling for a social credit system and I;m not saying Singapore is more right than anyone else. Just some thoughts.
Exactly right. That's one of the main points put forward. The increase in technology has lead to a breakdown of small communities, and small communities are how humans lived in most of history. Additionally, it's now impossible for small communities to be autonomous, because they still rely on technology which is controlled by the government and corporations.
I have to say this is more or less true. There's data showing people feel more lonely compared to even just a few decades ago. No way that large cities where no one knows each other, combined with over-reliance on social media for communication, has not played a significant role in this.
I have often said that the biggest reason for all the strife we have in the world is simply our numbers. When you increase the number of humans living amongst each other, you decrease the sense of community between those people, as rather than a small collection of people who all know each other intimately, and who all rely on each other for survival, you have hordes of people you don't know, who are competition. Instead of accountability, you have anonymity within the horde, and those who are less self-policing in terms of morality towards others feel much more free to prey upon their competition. Also, sociopathic power mongers are able to use that anonymity to successfully gain and maintain control over the population. Whereas in small societies of hundreds of people, this would be far more difficult.
It's certainly true that the communication technology that connects the whole world has only increased the vastness of the population co-existing in the same "space". That space is not even physical anymore.
I actually agree with the criticism that it's romanticising the past and looking at it through rose tinted glasses. There's a lot of ideals that effectively do this with different periods throughout history. That's why I say I don't really agree to the all or nothing approach he takes. I think he is certainly right that to be a member of modern society you must give up freedoms. But I then think most individuals find that compromise fair. I have concerns about the extent to which the state wishes to control our private lives, but I think ending society is kinda throwing the baby out with the bath water as far as solutions go.
I also agree. The entire reason that we moved away from hunter-gatherer bands and into agrarianism and then industrialism is because it affords us a higher quality of life, at least in many ways. The human lifespan used to be 35, 40 tops. Most people did not live that long. Hunger and pain and cold and heat and disease were constant battles in life. My guess is that if you were able to somehow go back and complain to ancient humans about the ills of modern society, they would be flabbergasted at how we could complain. Humans, like all animals, seek to survive. Our ability to survive is so vastly greater than it was at other points in history that it's not even comparable. Most of us wake up every day and don't even consider that we might die. Most of us are able to eat when we're hungry and we take that for granted. Yes, we have a whole host of problems that are existential that hunter-gatherers probably didn't have. And that spiritual pain is a different kind of pain. But I think we tend to severely over-romanticize the past. There is a reason we have always pushed for progress. If we dismantled society and reverted to hunter-gatherer tribes, my guess is that, given sufficient time, we would repeat the same path, for the same reasons.
