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If I lived in a time that was in the aftermath of a ruinous war made magnitudes worse by the possiblities of mass production, when futurists, fascists and nazis poured out of the woodwork celebrating the wonders of speed and machinery married to war and nationalism, when the working class lived in sprawling slums made possible by the factories that polluted the air they breathed and had, within living memory, employed children in the apalling conditions their parents still toiled in, I'd be rather pessimistic about technology as well. Truth be told, I don't know where this back-slapping, warmly humanistic optimism about technology comes from, even in a modern context. For all that advances in medicine have saved lives and transportation and telecommunications have closed vast distances, many of the technologies we take for granted were first used to kill people en masse or are being used for surveillance, or were developed through unethical means in the first place. Not to mention that the relentless march of progress we're all meant to be so proud of is destroying the planet by increments and allows a small and exclusive club of bellicose, imperialistic nations to end the world with nuclear fire at a moment's notice. You just need to look at the current crop of Silicon valley utopians and their insane, often perverse, prejudiced and outright reactionary ideas to see where such an attitude of unconstrained glee for the wonders of technology can get you.
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Mar 25, 2016 02:39
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Have you considered that his rantings and musings might have been hyperbolic or perhaps made in jest? I mean he also goes on about fruit juice drinkers ruining socialism and I'm not sure if I'd take that literally. EDIT: As much as Orwell laments the onward march of technology, it seems more like wistful reminiscence of commonplace things that were lost or set aside along the way. Particularly with regards to food, it would seem, and who can really blame him for that in an era when tinned and packaged foods were by all accounts pretty terrible. Industrialised society was and still is dehumanising in many respects, much more so in his day. More anecdotally, I live in a rural setting most of the time and it's quite discomfiting to visit an urban area and not see a scrap of green, sometimes for miles. Modernity is pretty jarring, even now. TomViolence fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Mar 25, 2016 |
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Mar 25, 2016 04:21
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