Technology peaked in 2003 when you could fit your record collection on one device but that device didn't yet spy on you or retrain your brain to be a needy bundle of anxieties.
— T I M E S C A N N E R (@timescanner) September 12, 2018
Mostly agreed. Technology as we use it and as it is built now is mostly harmful. It doesn’t have to be, and I am very much for tech progress, but what we’ve done now is emphatically not progress.
Just because you’re accustomed to being tracked, surveilled, monitored doesn’t make it right. It just makes you sanitized and pitiful, a believer in heinous propaganda and someone who does not and cannot control their own mind. We live in a technological panopticon where dissent is becoming impossible.
Though I don’t think it’s as great a show as others do, Stranger Things is interesting to me precisely because it was probably the time of the intersection of the greatest technical capability combined with the most freedom. You had cable, BBSes, walkie-talkies, etc., but it was difficult to impossible to do any real monitoring, especially en masse.
Oh, sure, it was possible but it took real effort. Someone had to be after you specifically.
Contrast that to today where your every move is tracked, stored in hidden databases for eternity, and could be used against you at any time, even 50 years hence.
We should burn it all down. I don’t think any meaningful reform is possible.