What do you think is the most dangerous thing about technology? Is it that it has the potential for mass destruction? Is it that it has the capability to create mobs of muddy-thinking malcontents much larger than ever previously known? Is it that it has given us the mechanism to pollute our entire planet?
All of these things are bad, but in my opinion they are not the worst aspect of technology. In fact, all of these things might have local solutions: international laws banning weapons, reformation of social media so that it is not so ridiculous (unlikely), or even technology to reduce and even reverse our impact on the earth.
In fact, there is something far worse about technology: it creates an environment where we are increasingly safe and physically taken care of, while at the same time it continually erodes our mental states by making us addicted drones to technology. Every step making us more firmly grasped comes with an improvement to our basic needs, so that we welcome it.
You might ask, what is so bad about being an addicted drone in the technological world? It is a world where being an individual is becoming irrelevant, and where basic human connections are harder and harder to make. And these are not independent: technology makes us less reliant on each other, and reliance is a key fundamental force that binds us into meaningful relationships.
But besides making meaningful relationships harder, technology inevitably bombards us with information, and right now it’s too much information for normal human beings to bear. Every person needs a certain amount of time to think in order to develop and reach some sort of level of life satisfaction, and the overwhelming amount of information out there is preventing that.
This cannot be solved by local solutions involving more technology. It is an intrinsic problem to technology itself. That is why I advocate eliminating as much of it from your life as you can, and at the same time, be very careful about the technology that you develop (if you happen to be creating any).
