Additionally, new technological advances eventually become required to adopt to stay in modern society, and they become more and more powerful (such as the genetic engineering in our future). Technology will also improve to a point so that 98% of people eventually will not be needed and have no function at all.

There is so much bitching about Global Capitalism - which is undoubtedly a problem, don't get me wrong - but nothing about the true source of many peoples' discontent: the Industrial Revolution and its consequences. Also, if you are not convinced, Tinder and other apps are a byproduct of technology.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3331464&forum_id=2#31259800)

technology makes GC possible

it makes globalization possible

it brings races from all over the world together in an unnatural state IMO (USA)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3331464&forum_id=2#31259811)

To answer your first sentence, the Insustrial Revolution is what got us to this point.

And to provide some detail as to why we weren't meant to live this way, do you disagree with the following analysis from his manifesto? He later makes the case that technology thwarts what he calls the "power process," which is at the root of many people's unhappiness:

33. Human beings have a need (probably based in biology) for something that we will call the “power process.” This is closely related to the need for power (which is widely recognized) but is not quite the same thing. The power process has four elements. The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone. We call it autonomy and will discuss it later (paragraphs 42-44).

34. Consider the hypothetical case of a man who can have anything he wants just by wishing for it. Such a man has power, but he will develop serious psychological problems. At first he will have a lot of fun, but by and by he will become acutely bored and demoralized. Eventually he may become clinically depressed. History shows that leisured aristocracies tend to become decadent. This is not true of fighting aristocracies that have to struggle to maintain their power. But leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert themselves usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even though they have power. This shows that power is not enough. One must have goals toward which to exercise one’s power.

35. Everyone has goals; if nothing else, to obtain the physical necessities of life: food, water and whatever clothing and shelter are made necessary by the climate. But the leisured aristocrat obtains these things without effort. Hence his boredom and demoralization.

36. Nonattainment of important goals results in death if the goals are physical necessities, and in frustration if nonattainment of the goals is compatible with survival. Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression.

37, Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3331464&forum_id=2#31259884)

Also, if I understand him correctly, he is saying that technology completely destroys the power process by making our base needs so easy to fill, and making nearly everything else in our lives dependent on factors well outside of our control. So technology = prolonged unhappiness because most people can no longer exercise the power process in a satisfactory manner.

I also believe he is saying that by destroying technology, and preventing it from ever coming back, that is the only way most people will ever be able to fulfill the power process again.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3331464&forum_id=2#31260351)

But presumably he'd be fine with societies that existed prior to the Industrial Revolution that incorporated very limited technology. Not sure what those would be though.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3331464&forum_id=2#31261232)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3331464&forum_id=2#31261359)

But I think the author's observations are scary, both because they align precisely with XO Ted's predictions made DECADES AGO, and because he doesn't understand the implications of what they mean.

The author seems to agree with Ted that people used to be happier in hunter gatherer times, though the author doesn't understand why (it is because technology prevents us from fulfilling what Ted calls the "power process," not any of the alternative reasons set forth in the article). He also seems to conclude that the only way to fix this is to re-engineer our bodies and minds to experience constant pleasure, such as by taking drugs that always make us happy, and devising newer and better distractions.

Ted makes the same observations, but goes much further by explaining why they will have devastating consequences. In part, he says:

119. The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity. [18] Of course the system does satisfy many human needs, but generally speaking it does this only to the extent that it is to the advantage of the system to do it. It is the needs of the system that are paramount, not those of the human being. For example, the system provides people with food because the system couldn’t function if everyone starved; it attends to people’s psychological needs whenever it can CONVENIENTLY do so, because it couldn’t function if too many people became depressed or rebellious. But the system, for good, solid, practical reasons, must exert constant pressure on people to mold their behavior to the needs of the system. To much waste accumulating? The government, the media, the educational system, environmentalists, everyone inundates us with a mass of propaganda about recycling. Need more technical personnel? A chorus of voices exhorts kids to study science. No one stops to ask whether it is inhumane to force adolescents to spend the bulk of their time studying subjects most of them hate. When skilled workers are put out of a job by technical advances and have to undergo “retraining,” no one asks whether it is humiliating for them to be pushed around in this way. It is simply taken for granted that everyone must bow to technical necessity. and for good reason: If human needs were put before technical necessity there would be economic problems, unemployment, shortages or worse. The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress.

147. The entertainment industry serves as an important psychological tool of the system, possibly even when it is dishing out large amounts of sex and violence. Entertainment provides modern man with an essential means of escape. While absorbed in television, videos, etc., he can forget stress, anxiety, frustration, dissatisfaction. Many primitive peoples, when they don’t have work to do, are quite content to sit for hours at a time doing nothing at all, because they are at peace with themselves and their world. But most modern people must be constantly occupied or entertained, otherwise they get “bored,” i.e., they get fidgety, uneasy, irritable.

157. Assuming that industrial society survives, it is likely that technology will eventually acquire something approaching complete control over human behavior. It has been established beyond any rational doubt that human thought and behavior have a largely biological basis. As experimenters have demonstrated, feelings such as hunger, pleasure, anger and fear can be turned on and off by electrical stimulation of appropriate parts of the brain. Memories can be destroyed by damaging parts of the brain or they can be brought to the surface by electrical stimulation. Hallucinations can be induced or moods changed by drugs. There may or may not be an immaterial human soul, but if there is one it clearly is less powerful that the biological mechanisms of human behavior. For if that were not the case then researchers would not be able so easily to manipulate human feelings and behavior with drugs and electrical currents.

158. It presumably would be impractical for all people to have electrodes inserted in their heads so that they could be controlled by the authorities. But the fact that human thoughts and feelings are so open to biological intervention shows that the problem of controlling human behavior is mainly a technical problem; a problem of neurons, hormones and complex molecules; the kind of problem that is accessible to scientific attack. Given the outstanding record of our society in solving technical problems, it is overwhelmingly probable that great advances will be made in the control of human behavior.

170. “Oh!” say the technophiles, “Science is going to fix all that! We will conquer famine, eliminate psychological suffering, make everybody healthy and happy!” Yeah, sure. That’s what they said 200 years ago. The Industrial Revolution was supposed to eliminate poverty, make everybody happy, etc. The actual result has been quite different. The technophiles are hopelessly naive (or self-deceiving) in their understanding of social problems. They are unaware of (or choose to ignore) the fact that when large changes, even seemingly beneficial ones, are introduced into a society, they lead to a long sequence of other changes, most of which are impossible to predict (paragraph 103). The result is disruption of the society. So it is very probable that in their attempts to end poverty and disease, engineer docile, happy personalities and so forth, the technophiles will create social systems that are terribly troubled, even more so than the present once. For example, the scientists boast that they will end famine by creating new, genetically engineered food plants. But this will allow the human population to keep expanding indefinitely, and it is well known that crowding leads to increased stress and aggression. This is merely one example of the PREDICTABLE problems that will arise. We emphasize that, as past experience has shown, technical progress will lead to other new problems that CANNOT be predicted in advance (paragraph 103). In fact, ever since the Industrial Revolution, technology has been creating new problems for society far more rapidly than it has been solving old ones. Thus it will take a long and difficult period of trial and error for the technophiles to work the bugs out of their Brave New World (if they every do). In the meantime there will be great suffering. So it is not at all clear that the survival of industrial society would involve less suffering than the breakdown of that society would. Technology has gotten the human race into a fix from which there is not likely to be any easy escape.

177. Needless to say, the scenarios outlined above do not exhaust all the possibilities. They only indicate the kinds of outcomes that seem to us most likely. But we can envision no plausible scenarios that are any more palatable than the ones we’ve just described. It is overwhelmingly probable that if the industrial- technological system survives the next 40 to 100 years, it will by that time have developed certain general characteristics: Individuals (at least those of the “bourgeois” type, who are integrated into the system and make it run, and who therefore have all the power) will be more dependent than ever on large organizations; they will be more “socialized” than ever and their physical and mental qualities to a significant extent (possibly to a very great extent) will be those that are engineered into them rather than being the results of chance (or of God’s will, or whatever); and whatever may be left of wild nature will be reduced to remnants preserved for scientific study and kept under the supervision and management of scientists (hence it will no longer be truly wild). In the long run (say a few centuries from now) it is likely that neither the human race nor any other important organisms will exist as we know them today, because once you start modifying organisms through genetic engineering there is no reason to stop at any particular point, so that the modifications will probably continue until man and other organisms have been utterly transformed.

178. Whatever else may be the case, it is certain that technology is creating for human beings a new physical and social environment radically different from the spectrum of environments to which natural selection has adapted the human race physically and psychologically. If man is not adjusted to this new environment by being artificially re-engineered, then he will be adapted to it through a long and painful process of natural selection. The former is far more likely than the latter.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3331464&forum_id=2#31263093)

Basically, proliferation of tech has turned us all into reptile-brained addicts. It makes complete sense that such rapid, enormous, widespread changes would fuck with a world that had zero technology just 6,000 years ago. Evolution, both biological and social, cannot even hope to keep apace; so rather than us controlling technology, technology controls us.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3331464&forum_id=2#31259818)

The reverse is not true. You can have technology without Global capitalism. Technology will continue to advance, just more slowly. And XO Ted says most of us will still be very unhappy and unfulfilled with our lives. So it is the true problem.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3331464&forum_id=2#31260356)

We are talking about Global Capitalism, remember? It absolutely needs technology. Globalization is inconceivable without it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3331464&forum_id=2#31262994)

Without billionaires selling everything for profit, technology could actually benefit us all and be used for the common good.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3331464&forum_id=2#31261470)

XO Ted would have the same criticisms about life in Russia, an anti-GC society.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3331464&forum_id=2#31263016)