[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by dead_battery

i dont think both of you guys criticism is particulary fair or accurate. projecting christian moralism onto what i'm saying, when it's the exact thing i'm trying to get away from.

Who brought up Christianity?? I wasn't trying to criticize, more so critique. Its been my observation over these years that you are hopeless (and not in the pejorative sense, rather the literal) about sociological and philosophical matters but head over heals in love with the "progress" of science. It is perhaps the ONE and ONLY thing you ever talk about on this forum in positive terms and I get the impression that your face lights up when you talk about it in person. I wasn't trying to diss you at all, just point out that it is a reflection of your faith in science and modernity, and indeed as !@#$%! mentioned that post-modernism is to view with skepticism and scrutiny the "values" of science and "progress" to alleviate all the ills of the human experience. You may WANT to get away from the emotive idea of faith and belief, but it is the ontological reality of your perspective whether you're aware of it or not. Its a logical conclusion, if you argue that science and progress will "improve" or "solve" critical issues of the human experience, yet this hasn't happened yet, it demonstrates your faith, belief, and possibly even hope in the sciences and technology.

i think my attitude is more realistic because im basically saying there are aspects of progress that we can plan ahead for and use for our own ends.

Yet you've already mentioned how technology is actually starting to further empower the forces of corruption, greed, and ineptitude that are as you've also mentioned the root of our own evils.

we can claw back some freedom if we can accurately allign ourselves with the technical progress that is on the way, because for a moment before it exists it's there in a virtual sense and the field is open for what its ultimate fate will be.

You are very hopeful indeed, I'm a bit more pessimistic about this myself..

to me this attitude is totally and utterly redundant because technical progress happens whether we like it or not, and the machines are working on us just as equally as we work on them, so the only sane attitude is to allign yourself not with the utopian or unrealistic aspects of progress, but with a determination to experiment/weaponise/use it because it is happening whether you like it or not.

By calling it "progress" you've already brought into the world of morality and ethical assessment, not the raw data of science like you'd want to. Technology is what it is. Progress is a relativist, moralist term. Technology can be good, it can bad, it can both at the same time. Also remember its a human creation, so it is as weak, vulnerable, and flawed as the humans who create and operate it. So, to call "progress irrelevant" is a matter of blind faith, not prophecy, because remember if humans use technology to exaggerate our own human fuck ups THAT bad, it can all fall backwards. Our world is a house of cards, you're right, in this era they are very modern, technological cards, but they are fragile as they ever have been. Rome was the most advanced technological civilization and lasted for many centuries, but succumbed to the inevitable progression to the mean. The Muslim empires of the Medieval era were even more modernistic, yet look at the shambles their world is today?? There is an inevitable ebb and flow, true, now we are flowing in an upward direction, but how can you know that nothing can set us back in a future that doesn't even exist yet?