The past few years have been weird and our culture has seen a meteoric rise in inverted values.
Globalism has evaporated to nationalism, the universally held value of an education has transformed into anti-intellectualism, etc.
What’s valuable about this type of role reversal is that it suggests a reframing of our unquestioned values. By applying different hypothetical starting points, we are allowed to reframe our world and make some staggering realizations.
The most significant of these recent discoveries is this: technology is the devil.
This can be difficult to accept: “No, Karl,” you might say, “technology is the hero we need, nay, deserve.”
But I assure you now that technology — that beautiful, virginal flower — has only come to destroy you and all that you love.
Humanity, at its best, tends away from sloth. Laziness is considered derogatory to the person and the society; idle hands are devil’s playthings.
That’s why we need to recognize the extent to which jobs have turned to automation and just how inherently flawed such a post-labour society is.
McDonald’s has replaced their ordering stations with digital, touch-screen kiosks. Factory labour is becoming more and more automated by robots. Applications have been developed to distill minor legal proceedings down to the press of a button. Self-driving cars are being developed.
The problem with all of this is that we live in a capitalist society. Capitalism is awesome, because it challenges every person to be the best that they can be and gives them fiscal rewards for doing so.
But if we remove every workplace opportunity, where do the funds to drive this society come from?
Automating jobs ruins the whole economy because it takes the equitable dispensation of cash flow and automatically reroutes it to the top — to the owners of said technology.
But I assure you now that technology — that beautiful, virginal flower — has only come to destory you and everything you love.
And that’s not all: let’s talk about fake news for moment. Such a phenomenon would not be even remotely possible were it not for the egalitarian model of the world- wide-web.
By providing an equal platform for every single voice, we’re distilling value. Your ten-year-old sister’s blog, masked by graphics, could make a believable claim to be as valuable as the Washington Post.
Worst of all, let’s not pretend that artificial intelligence is a truly terrifying thing.
The internet serves as a hive mind that we voluntarily input the entire aggregated knowledge of human history.
If we ever succeed in fully turning that into an authentic artificial intelligence, it’s only logical that, based on our horrible treatment of our planet, this supercomputer will generally believe us obsolete and allow all of humanity to die off.
It’s the next pragmatically logical step in evolution — if we make something better than ourselves, we become redundant.
Our modern society likes to believe that technology is always a progressive climb forward, but this is false.
History has worked in waves of technology, with peaks and pitfalls. We’ve been on an upward trajectory for too long; it’s time to come back down.
Friends, countrymen: I say to you now, that this is the time for us to switch off the internet.
For humanity to survive indefinitely, we must make some extreme course corrections in how we choose to approach our idea of civilization.
Let’s cling to the romantic associations we have that cause us to prefer vinyl records to MP3s and physical books to eBooks, by giving up on technology.
This will allow the human race to progress through alternative avenues into the bright, distant, eternal future.