alt Hacker NewsHumans weren't built to live in massive societies with 100s of millions of people.
No wonder we love minecraft and Satisfactory and playing murder-hobos in ttrpgs. I would be in favor of restructuring society to be in smaller units, communities where people know and understand eachother, but nobody has that power.
One thing I disagree with "We won’t live in small villages with cobbled streets en masse anymore because we need the giant glass skyscrapers and the congealed intellect of our multi billion population to move ahead"
Do we? What is "moving ahead"? I would say there's a good chance our way of life is simply going to waste all the resouces that sustains it and collapse over a long period of time without moving on to a "higher" state. I know lots of people working in tech, none of whom actually advance useful technology. Instead they advance technology that makes their bosses rich and makes people consume more for no real benefit. That's actually the opposite of useful. The glass skyscrapers are not helping us move ahead.
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I don't hate it, but at the same time things like the power grid and semiconductor manufacturing have supply chains that easily have 100 million people each in them if you follow it down enough. That's probably underestimating it, even. Modern society is super complex like that, however I don't think it's accurate to say that electricity and the internet have not brought any benefits to humanity.
I get it, it can be alienating to live in modern society. But you can create meaning and community even today. Probably not if you spend 80 hours a week in the office, but if you put in the effort to get to know your neighbors, join local sports clubs and keep up with the friendships you've built over the years, having a social group is not out of reach. It's just that you can't maximize for two different goals at the same time.
I feel like you can have both. A big society with industry and laws and markets etc. and a circle of like 10-50 people that you consider close. That's basically how I see my own life.
Humans weren't built at all.
It just depends how far through the eye of the needle we already went, and how far we have to go. I don't want to go backwards. Humans are adapting, always locally, and never uniformly.
We have to move to stars, maybe not all at once.
i like breaking bad in RimWorld
Centralizing populations helps with energy and transportation efficiency, which is important if you care about the environment.
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> Humans weren't built to live in massive societies with 100s of millions of people.
Humans were built to socialize and live in societies though. It's part of our own nature to group up and form communities.