alt Hacker NewsWhy should I care about tech? As someone who grew up in a city, with a family that ran a business building mainframes back in the early computer days, there is nothing to romanticize.
That’s why your comment is not particularly well-received. I’ve had the exact opposite experience as you, I’ve seen overwhelming sadness and misery and depression spawned from a tech-filled life. I hardly can count the few crazy deep into tech who seem at peace simultaneously. So many people leave tech for something more meaningful is almost a meme at this point. The only defense I ever hear is “well if people would just…” but people DON’T just. They never just. They never have just, and they never will just.
In nature, this works out just fine, because there are many natural guardrails. Don’t piss off the tiger. Guardrail: it eats you. Don’t gorge on your fish pond. Guardrail: you deplete and starve.
In society, there are no guardrails because individuals can have massively outsized impacts. One man can start a construction project that depletes his pond, then deplete 40 other ponds refilling his own.
> Why should I care about tech?
Because we're on a news discussion site about technology, run by a technology incubator, frequented by those who work with and use technology? More substantively, you don't have to care about technology, but if you're arguing that technological society makes people miserable, that's an empirical claim.
> As someone who grew up in a city, with a family that ran a business building mainframes back in the early computer days, there is nothing to romanticize.
I agree! Human labor should not be romanticized.
> So many people leave tech for something more meaningful is almost a meme at this point.
Anecdotes are not data. Can you actually show this?
> In society, there are no guardrails because individuals can have massively outsized impacts. One man can start a construction project that depletes his pond, then deplete 40 other ponds refilling his own.
Society has guardrails: laws, property rights, regulation, liability, prices, taxes, permits, and collective institutions. You seem to be taking an example of an externality and then twisting it into an argument that these don't guardrails don't exist, when they plainly do.
And I'm not sure “deplete your food supply and starve” is a very compelling example of nature's superior guardrails. We have built those social guardrails precisely because we'd prefer to prevent the damage rather than have starvation enforce the constraint afterward.