There is a troubling epiphany on the other side of being an insatiable tech nerd…  All my life I have been utterly captivated by our advances in the tech world.  In my lifetime I have watched computers grow from disconnected, command line only heaps.  I remember calculating the number of family pictures I could feasibly store on a 3.5 floppy disk.  I remember the first time I got on our new 14.4 K dial up internet, discovering “WebCrawler”, the excitement I felt when my family bought a computer with a 56 K modem, knowing I’d be able to download my favorite songs in midi format in mere minutes.  And now, here we are, smack dab in the future I dreamed about as a kid. We have self driving electric cars (almost), streaming 4k video, all the music I can handle that I can acquire faster than I could ever listen to it.  The most cost effective hard drive on the market, dollar for dollar is 10 terabytes.

Yet even as I write this, I know that in 5 years time, these impressive statistics will warrant little more than a nostalgic chuckle…

So what the fuck is an Anti-Technologist?  Well, obviously, I don’t hate technology…  But I am beginning to fear it.  You see, the fundamental purpose of technology is that it is meant to solve a problem.  It helps us live longer, it helps us travel farther, in less time.  It makes us safer, corrects our diseases, and so on.  The only problem with all of this is that we have always had a tendency to be so excited about solving the problem that we become blind to the problems we may potentially create.  At best, these techno-miracles have always suffered from a compliment of horrendous near-sightedness.  There is a valid argument that there is no way we could have predicted the consequences of high technology, but now that they are in our faces, the wise can see no justification to continue.

I want to ensure it is stated early on that I make no assertions to any “solution” to the main issues I’d like to point out, only that they are problems.  Things like overpopulation.  One might assume that by pointing to overpopulation as a problem that I may be advocating for some mass murder.  That is absolutely not the case.  None the less the problem exists; and that acts as a perfect transition into the first point.  Medicine was invented to solve a problem.  We wanted to have more control over death.  We wanted to cure disease so that we could stave off the inevitable pain of losing our loved ones.  This was absolutely a noble pursuit, however, it has no less led us to a situation where our planet is approaching a point where it can no longer sustain additional human life.

Cars where an improvement on the horse, and represented a massive leap forward in personal transportation and it worked so well that now, this transportation solution is partially the cause of the dying planet problem.  Same with farming practices.  Farming revolutionized the way we acquire food, and did it so well that we learned how we could support exponentially more people on a given plot of land than ever before, but now, we have mono-culture crops driving animals extinct and a meat production complex that is further degrading our worlds ability to support life.

You see the point here, is that every technology we create, seems to not only cause problems, but the problems the technology is obviously causing seems to be much greater than the problem we initially intended to solve.

At this point I haven’t taken this philosophical branch much further than this.  I’m still trying to understand what it all adds up to… What it all means, but for now, I think we need to slow down and find a way to test these things with much greater attention paid to the potential consequences of mass adoption of any technology.  No, you’re car isn’t ruining the planet, but the billions of cars that there are, are.