this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2025
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The Great Problem

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"The great problem facing modern man is that, that the means by which we live have outdistanced the spiritual ends for which we live. So we find ourselves caught in a messed-up world. The problem is with man himself and man's soul." - February 28, 1954. Detroit Michigan, United States of America

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Was "The Great Problem" being solved in year 1992?

“a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon expressed it, has been replaced by the idea of technological progress. The aim is not to reduce ignorance, superstition, and suffering but to accommodate ourselves to the requirements of new technologies. We tell ourselves, of course, that such accommodations will lead to a better life, but that is only the rhetorical residue of a vanishing technocracy. We are a culture consuming itself with information, and many of us do not even wonder how to control the process. We proceed under the assumption that information is our friend, believing that cultures may suffer grievously from a lack of information, which, of course, they do. It is only now beginning to be understood that cultures may also suffer grievously from information glut, information without meaning, information without control mechanisms.” ― Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, 1992

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

“Alfred North Whitehead summed it up best when he remarked that the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the idea of invention itself. We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers—that is to say, as markets.” ― Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, 1992

 

"if something could be done it should be done" - USA take over Canada because the USA military can do it

"if something could be done it should be done" - USA create DOGE and cut military veteran services

"if something could be done it should be done" - Invest money like crazy on artificial intelligence and hand it over to children and hostile nations so they can LOL while USA drowns under garbage generative machine output. Sincerity, truth, and goodness are swamped in endless streams of junk content to keep machines running with "fresh" output.

"if something could be done it should be done" - USA has the power to take over Greenland, so do it

"if something could be done it should be done" - There are fires in Los Angeles California, so have military Army Corps of Engineers suddenly opened up the dams of California’s Lake Kaweah and Lake. The three day-long releases cost the two Tulare County reservoirs more than 2.2 billion gallons of water, just do it because it could be done

 

Technology mania. Twitter / X meme consumer mania. Apple iPhone meme garbage consumption technology mania.