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PROMETHIAN_DREAM

                                             December 07, 2009
                                             August   28, 2013
   Once upon a time, I was enamored
   of a technophillic view of human
   history I tend to call "promethian".

   The story of civilization is the
   the story of a rapidly expanding          I might have pointed toward
   understanding of the material             Jerry Pournelle as being the
   world co-evolving with rapidly            main prophet of the promethian
   expanding control of it.                  for me... though really it was
                                             something I'd absorbed over
       Given this world view, you tend       years of reading things like
       to see all social improvements        science fiction, Buckminster
       as side-effects of the                Fuller, and so on.
       technological imperative.
                                                    And the Fuller connection
          E.g. slavery is banned not because        was of course The Whole
          of improvements in our morality,          Earth Catalog.  It always
          but because technological changes         comes down to Stewart
          make it obsolete.                         Brand, doesn't it?

             And if you look at any
             current social problem,
             you start looking for      Just to pick one: I thought the
             technological fixes.       automatic self-cleaning public toilets
                                        made by that French company sounded
                                        like a great solution when I first
                                        read about them.  Willie Brown cut a
                                        deal to get a bunch of them installed
                                        around SF: they're constantly broken,
                                        and broken-into, and used as living
                                        quarters by the local scumzoids.

             The hope: find an end
             run around seemingly
             intractable human
             problems by reducing
             them to solvable           TECHIES_FALLACY
             physical ones.
                                                         ANTI-PROMETHIAN
                  There's a similar appeal
                  in free market libertarian
                  ideas: looking for a radical
                  simplification along with          LIBERTY
                  the radical reduction.




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