alt Hacker News> 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.
I’m not arguing that human labor shouldn’t be romanticized. I’m arguing that computer labor shouldn’t be romanticized MORE than the agrarian variety. Of course labor should be romanticized. Every single thing we have to show as a species is the result of labor.
And us being able to create guardrails which sometimes work if you’re caught is not the same as a force of nature. There are no good or bad outcomes in nature, there are only consequences. This is absolutely not true in civilization.
We have nearly zero guardrails to prevent the damage. Did… you see Nepal? You realize this is a direct result of us either not having, or easily ignoring those guardrails?
As it turns out, starving because you chose to overeat is not going to have the same intensity as a law requiring you to please choose to throw back a fish which is too small (ignore the story about third world countries doing bomb fishing).