this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
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I've spent time over the years wondering why I receive hostile or angry criticism. A few ideas float to my mind. Judging by the responses I do receive, many seem to be uncomfortable giving up any current personal comfort in order to address deeper questions about health, safety, how we work with the environment around us and who actually benefits from our current technology.
I've made no attempts to suggest solutions. The automation industry is far too complex for me to even try. The covid lockdowns showed me just how vulnerable the automation industry is to disruptions. Something that's vulnerable to disruptions should be questioned. Especially when so many lives are dependent on it.
Those deeper questions may just lead us in a completely different direction. That is nothing to fear. In the process of that, we may just find a comfort zone between technology, nature and human creativity where it can all exist with minimal pain for us and everything around us.
Decreasing our dependence on technology will allow us, the ones who do not hoard wealth as a means of power over other people, to gain control and independence in our personal lives and our immediate communities. When we can be independent, we can become more resistent to disruptions in our communities.
All this requires us to be open, honest and to have the the will to attempt change. From my personal experiences and perspective, doing more of the same only enables to current situation.
What you're saying reminds me of things that vegans say: "If everybody knew the full story, they'd change their behaviour". I think this is only partially true since change is hard.
I lurk in some vegan forums for the recipes but the majority of posts seem intended to invoke outrage, probably to help promote behaviour change.
Now, what if there were books and movies and forums about the horrors of automated factories? Would people change?
It also showed how valuable the automation industry was to cutting COVID-19 off at its knees if a bunch of pansy right-wingers hadn't started to screech they couldn't breath because of a few grams of paper on their face. (Weird how they can wear masks now when it involves being cruel to non-whites...)
When COVID-19 hit there was a shortage of surgical and N95 masks world-wide. Then a guy invented a machine that could "print" obscene numbers of surgical masks per day, each machine costing only about $50,000. Within weeks surgical masks were available to the point that they cost almost nothing. Then someone else figured out how to make KN95 masks easier to mass produce on the same kind of "printing" machine and now KN95 masks are also cheap like borscht and universally available.
Without automation there'd have been a whole lot more deaths to COVID-19 around the world, not just in snowflake countries.
What are “snowflake countries”?
The ones that had enormous numbers of people having public meltdowns because they had to wear a few grams of paper over their mouth and nose.