@eddiebbot 2/2 opportunities in life and live longer, but we live diminished lives and do not have the same vital force. We have to compensate for new deficiencies by artificial procedures that in turn produce other new deficiencies. --Jaques Ellul The Technological Bluff (1988) #dystopia #technology
Q: So, anything new? What'd you do today?
A: Oh, dug through menus in a new AV receiver to find its MAC addresses, configured my network DHCP server to give it a static address, and then wrote some iptables rules to keep that address from being able to reach outside the LAN. Pretty standard stuff.
Looking for a "DO NOT CONNECT THIS MACHINE TO THE INTERNET NO MATTER HOW MUCH IT NAGS" warning sign to print out.
@eddiebbot 2/2 during the "beautiful season," and there is more work in winter. This disturbs life's rhythm. --Jaques Ellul The Technological Bluff (1988) #dystopia #technology
[en] #MS Win 11 «Recall»: "#Snapshotting and #AI processing a screen every 3 seconds"
#creepy re-introduction of «Recall», “AI” powered technology was supposed to take #screenshot|s of your #activity every five seconds".
"... #Microsoft, clearly hungry to further #monetize absolutely everything you do, announced ... bringing #Recall back."
Opt-out may not help much, linked #ArsTechnica ... suggests.
@eddiebbot 3/3 Bluff (1988) #dystopia #technology
@eddiebbot 3/3 --Jaques Ellul The Technological Bluff (1988) #dystopia #technology
Cyberpunk is Gen X’s “populuxe”—or using aesthetics to predict the future https://www.davideriknelson.com/sbsb/index.php/2025/04/cyberpunk-is-gen-xs-populuxe-or-using-aesthetics-to-predict-the-future/ #dystopia #newsF #NowIsTheFuture #Prognostication #RecommendedReading #ScienceFiction #scifi #WilliamGibson
@eddiebbot 2/2 modifications of our whole being: our instincts, perceptions, vision, sense of time, instinctive conduct, interpretative perception. Our very notions of fatigue and prediction have changed in both form and meaning. In the area of the transformation of labor we have a typical example of the price that has to be paid. --Jaques Ellul The Technological Bluff (1988) #dystopia #technology
@eddiebbot 2/2 that the countryside without inhabitants is either uninterestingly incoherent or else it takes the form of a public park. --Jaques Ellul The Technological Bluff (1988) #dystopia #technology
@eddiebbot 2/2 transported and distributed free (since they have no cash to give in return). This cost of maintaining a people that used to have a stable society has to be regarded as the passive side of the activity of seal hunting. --Jaques Ellul The Technological Bluff (1988) #dystopia #technology
@eddiebbot 2/2 deny that consumption is up but to point out that the growth is far less important than imagined. We have to include products that are eliminated. Mechanized farming may produce more food, but we have to consider that a calorie of food now demands the consumption of a calorie of fuel. A team of oxen or horses would use less. --Jaques Ellul The Technological Bluff (1988) #dystopia #technology
Rewatching Fury Road with some young family members. I forgot that Furiosa has a robot arm! One she can drive and fight with. In a post-civilisation desert. What a pantomime.
Must rewatch the real Mad Max films sometime.
@eddiebbot 2/2 "sublimate" their drive for power into some harmless hobby. --Ted Kaczynki, Technological Slavery (2010) #dystopia #technology
...pollution, health problems, protective measures, nuisances of all kinds. Growth carries with it costs that change all calculations according to whether we include them. There has been agricultural destruction in order to promote industrial development (e.g., in the Tennessee Valley in the USA or the juran??on vineyard in France). --Jaques Ellul The Technological Bluff (1988) #dystopia #technology
@eddiebbot 2/2 --Ted Kaczynki, Technological Slavery (2010) #dystopia #technology
@eddiebbot 2/2 reckon what economists now call externals --Jaques Ellul The Technological Bluff (1988) #dystopia #technology
@eddiebbot 2/2 Technical progress does not know where it is going. This is why it is unpredictable, and why it produces in society a general unpredictability. --Jaques Ellul The Technological Bluff (1988) #dystopia #technology
Four propositions concerning the use of technology: First, all technical progress has its price. Second, at each stage it raises more and greater problems than it solves. Third, its harmful effects are inseparable from its beneficial effects. Fourth, it has a great number of unforeseen effects. --Jaques Ellul The Technological Bluff (1988) #dystopia #technology
We are set in an ambiguous universe in which each technical advance accentuates the complexity of the mixture of positive and negative elements. The more progress there is in this field, the more inextricable is the relation between the good and the bad, the more choice becomes impossible, and the less we can escape the ambivalent effects of the system. --Jaques Ellul The Technological Bluff (1988) #dystopia #technology
My meaning is that technical development is neither good, bad, nor neutral. It is a complex mixture of positive and negative elements. Some are good and some are bad, if we want to use moral terms. It is impossible to dissociate them and thus to achieve a purely good technique. Also, good results do not depend at all on the use which we make of technical equipment. In effect, even in such use we ourselves are modified in turn. --Jaques Ellul The Technological Bluff (1988) #dystopia #technology
