The text argues that 20th-century neoliberal capitalism, driven by exponential profit motives and technological exploitation, led to societal atomization and a loss of meaning, prompting a "Neo-Luddite Revolution" that selectively rejected harmful technologies to foster genuine human connection and creativity.
the neo-luddite revolution
the epoch of a civilization can often be
understood through the content of the
stories we tell
in many ways the very construct of a
society is a story therefore history
becomes the scripture of culture
this curated version of events can then
become something agreed upon and
cherished something to be proud of
or create a collectivized guilt
the story of the 20th century
had been that of the triumph of
capitalism we had placed our faith in
the free market and in doing so gained
greater prosperity
the west had become a beacon of
ideological freedom of expression of
democracy and of consumption but the
looming inevitability of monopolization
as a result of the stratification of
wealth ever working its way to the
corporate elites
allowed for a growing entanglement of
state and business and the birth of the
neo-liberal economic framework that
would become its downfall
in doing so we began to create new areas
for companies to explore and exploit the
snake would eat its tail ever more
quickly and the ant hill would produce
an ever-growing pile of casualties what
happens when you reach the limit of how
much something can grow
you find a new area to enter into this
is a foundational understanding of the
neo-liberal principle of capitalism
nothing can come between a company's
exponential profits not morality
principles or even the ecological
well-being of the planet
the diverging fault line between our
human desire for connection community
fulfillment and the cold calculating
world of finance fast food and
atomization were emboldening a tension
between the existence we were creating
and the human that had to experience it
the vast distraction mechanism of
abundance the american dream of anyone
being able to climb the hierarchy
through hard work and dedication acted
as a replacement for the religiosity of
previous centuries
god is dead proclaimed nisha in 1882 in
reference to the post-enlightenment
period of a new search for meaning and a
consequential necessity to overcome the
lack of dogmatic ideology
just 110 years later fukuyama would
proclaim the end of history in supposing
that we had solved the problem of how to
run a society with the liberal democracy
the squeezing of the proverbial square
peg into the round hole of meaning
resulted in an emptiness as exhibited in
films such as american psycho and fight
club the proclamation of need for the
human spirit to break the chains of our
bubble wrap paradise and in doing so
presenting our suppressed shadow selves
the history of the 20th century provided
the contextualization for what was to come
come
although technology and computers had
been around for a number of years they
were becoming exponentially more
accessible first in the home then in the
pocket as the technology was becoming
ever more complex it would begin to see
each person as an individual for
economic reasoning cleverly targeting us
with personalized advertisements the
correlatory relationship between the
profit margins and the time spent on
websites and applications quickly led to
an abuse of the utilization of
algorithms the more time you spend on
our app the more money we make so we all
became both addicted and the product
simultaneously the neoliberal capitalism
of the previous century was reaching
fever pitch the money was now in the
hands of so few and those few were so
ingrained in the legislation and running
of our new world that everything had to
become profit oriented
streaming services were comparing
themselves to sleep drinks companies
were competing with the consumption of
water everything was a commodity
investment firms were buying up what was
left of the free world and we all began
to give up our personal sovereignty the
world economic forum was telling us we
will own nothing and be happy
but as long as we could stare at our
phones mindlessly scroll and have next
day delivery of the objects of third
world slavery we would be content with
our new purpose as the sex organs of technology
technology
when confronting the end of an epoch
this time around being late stage
capitalism it requires the ability to be
aware of its dying but with the society
engrossed in the vapid over consumption
of vacuous content
distracting ourselves from the fact that
the roof was on fire and it's time to
get out
what would this escape from nihilism
look like
2020 and the depth of the worldwide
pandemic the cracks started to really
show the technopoly had allowed runaway
algorithms to direct the population down
ever more elaborate rabbit holes leading
to vast echo chambers and inevitable
tribalism the necessity to keep people
online for as long as possible had led
to the over consumption of information
and ideas of little or any quality and
then continue to present them only with
persons of the same beliefs or ones that
were even more undesirable
an awareness of what was happening began
to simmer people started to realize that
in their distracted state the world had
begun to rot and their freedoms were
being taken away
a rising authoritarianism had become the
necessary response to the populace's
newfound questioning of what was
outwardly occurring
the foreshadowing of the chinese social
credit system and how media state and
business was seemingly working together
internationally to create a narrative
through which to lead us to a state of
globalized autocracy
on one side was the huxley in nightmare
of being drowned in irrelevance and
distraction where truth had become
difficult to find and on the other
orwellian vision of oppression in the
decade leading up to the end of the
pandemic we had seen both
manifest in technology
ingrained in this paradigm the nostalgia
for the absolute was ever present
manifesting in increasingly strange ways
from raging culture wars that would lead
to the outbidding of the majority from
morality to the messiah-like reverence
placed upon billionaires
with the gift of retrospection as
consequence of the accelerationism
the pandemic provided and in seeing what
had been happening to consciousness on
both individual and societal level the
need for a restructuring of society was
difficult to ignore
so we began to look back
in doing so the epicureanism that
predated marx would come to the
forefront of conversations of life
fulfillment what do we really need
became the question the neo-luddite
expression of selective technological
rejection was quickly integrated into
the procedure necessary for adopting new technologies
