What made millennials trust technology?

[pbrower2a]

(08-31-2019, 06:31 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

(08-31-2019, 06:00 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: The Millennial Generation, unless growing up in extreme destitution or in a culture (Old Order Amish) that rejects technologies of entertainment has lived in the most technologically-advanced world.  Although the technology of the 1980's (like VHS tapes and VCRs) is often so obsolete that it hardly sells at Goodwill, even that was remarkable at the time. Much of what we consider technological progress is in practice doing more with lesser inputs of material; mass alone demonstrates the difference between a now-primitive 25" monitor TV that one can hardly lift and a 32" LED TV that one can handle easily. 

Technology makes access to entertainment far easier, and in a mass culture like ours that matters more than does the quality of what is on it.

So for millennials, technology = entertainment? Sounds plausible given what they write online I'm an Xennial myself, so I can partly identify, in 2003-5 I could spend hours watching bare-bellied girls dance on MTV music videos or playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

Mass low culture fills the role that Karl Marx attributed to religion: the opiate of the masses. It is the surrogate of real life. If you can't get sex because you are broke and ugly, then there is pornography.  If you can't go anywhere because the landlord so bleeds you that you are stranded in a tiny apartment except when working two jobs to pay him off when not paying off loan-sharks, you get to witness the witless antics of 'celebrities'. If you have the dubious opportunity to live in a low-rent area, then you get country music to confirm reality. 

OK, I admit: such high culture as opera and middlebrow culture as Broadway musicals are also fantasy. We need some fantasy, especially if life is mostly awful because we are poor, hate our jobs, and find life sheer drudgery if we aren't working and not diddling with a video game or watching something idiotic on the idiot screen.  We must admit something else: the secret of happiness in much of life is stupidity, so mind-rotting entertainment helps make people politically docile. With leaders like Donald Trump, one needs to be stupid to be happy if one isn't filthy rich.   

Can't we do better? Or must we debase ourselves to fit the current nastiness of life?

Quote:Older generations' fear of technology was about fears of mass destruction (Hiroshima) or totalitarian control (Big Brother). By the time millennials arrived, these fears have been shown to be exaggerated.

It is fortunate that those who got the nukes got scared of what they could do. The first two uses of nuclear explosions on enemy cities were possible only after some convoluted thinking after a nation was demonized for what its demonic leaders did. Maybe now we recognize that the subjects of a totalitarian state like Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Thug Japan, Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, and Baath fascist nightmares in Syria and Iraq are not at fault for the crimes of the states that they follow. I am tempted to believe that had the D-Day invasion failed and kept Nazi Germany alive and killing into late 1945, then some German cities would have been nuked -- and the pretext would have been the Holocaust. It is far easier to nuke a country whose leaders imposed the Bataan Death March than a country that is clean of such immoral conduct. 

I recall that the world got less complacent about nukes after the Soviet Union and Western countries started having international conferences between their scientists. Their nuclear scientists might visit Paris or Copenhagen and decide that nuking a place so magnificent would be a horrific crime. Ours might visit Prague or Leningrad and decide that nuking a place so magnificent would be a horrific crime. The university that had the research that made the nukes that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki possible (the University of California at Berkeley) became a center of anti-nuclear sentiment, and the father of the Soviet H-bomb (Andrei Sakharov) became one of the leading dissidents in the Soviet Union. 

Let us remember also that one of the points that got the Soviet Union to negotiate a halt in the escalation of nuclear arsenals and missiles for delivery was that the deal could keep Soviet satellites from getting their own nukes. Soviet diplomats could go to the puppet leaders of countries of the Warsaw pact and warn them to sign the nuclear treaty that the USSR wanted or face overthrow. In 1989, Romania seemed to have a nuclear program in its early stage.  

At the least science has some standards of intellectual integrity, one of which is to not stifle basic truth. A totalitarian regime in America might have stifled a calculation of what a nuclear blast centered upon the Loop of Chicago would do -- or could it? 

.............  

As for the technology of tyranny -- it isn't all that sophisticated. The red-hot poker pointed at the rectum is hardly a sophisticated technology. The FBI proved far more sophisticated in breaking conspiracies than its contemporary counterparts in the Gestapo, the KGB, and the Mukhabarat. If it can't beat confessions out of people, then the FBI can track phone conversations, paper trails, and spending patterns to nail people who do certain crimes. Being more sophisticated than the cleverest crook is one way of causing smart people with sociopathic tendencies to not do horrible things to people.    

Behavior marks the totalitarian order. If one looks at Lawrence Britt's fourteen warning signs of fascism:




most of these traits well define not only Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, Tojo, Antonescu, Szalasi, the Greek colonels' regime, Pinochet, Videla, and Montt (and regrettably Trump) but also many 'socialist' regimes as well. Saddam Hussein and the Kim dynasty, anyone? Ceausescu? Castro? It seems to fit Iran under the Ayatollahs very well. 

.......

We have a greater menace from technology -- its capacity for numbing our consciences and consciousness, its potential for destruction of human bonds, and its use as a surrogate for thought. I wish people would use the technology of the Internet to latch onto great literature, art, and music that people could share.... but people lack the sophistication to go beyond noticing what is 'cool' and 'neat'. A gang rape as sexual entertainment? A beheading video? A rehash of Nazi-style racism? No thanks!

Maybe cat videos are not high art, but that is harmless. I would rather that people use the Internet to attach to great music, discover the canon of old literature, and seek great art. This said, what is wrong with the old-fashioned ice-cream social, playing a board game as a family, telling ghost stories and eating 'smores around a campfire, and doing some painting or origami? Technology is at best a way of doing other things that used to be delightful and enriching. One can obviously never hear a live performance of Pablo Casals playing the cello suites of J S Bach, but we have recordings. 

Knowing what to do with the technology is even more important than having it. Access to child pornography is unwelcome. Geezers like I can show people where to look for some worthy use of time and bandwidth.