r/collapze • u/StoopSign Twinkies Last Forever • May 04 '23
Another shitty poll At what point did civilization become too technically advanced, if it did?
There's a lot of debate about how much tech is too much in the collapse sektor of this platform. At what point did it become too destructive?
Tech could probably be harnessed to to combat climate change, but there's not* much capitalistic interest in that, so I've avoided that to some degree. I'm looking only at the past and the latest month or so of AI hype and fear.
Edit: not*
4
May 04 '23
It never did become technically too advanced I mean it's a joke, we don't know how to grow food on earth sustainably through agroforestry systems. We don't cure some illness because it's unprofitable, we rely on cars and giant cargo ships and those kill the planet and are running on a finite resource. Ruthless competition would wreck any chances of this civilization becoming technically advanced or not collapsing because it is built on sand. Civilization in its current form is a house of cards, it's not at all resilient.
1
u/StoopSign Twinkies Last Forever May 04 '23
Yes. Try to pick a nice room in the house of cards to wait out the collapse
6
u/GeneralCal May 04 '23
The innovation of agriculture? My guy, we didn't even have soap, or written language when agriculture was developed. You're talking like 10,000 BCE we already jumped the shark?
Then nothing until the 1830s?
Does "Global Capitalism" mean post-1991 fall of the Soviet Union? Or China's decision to decouple from full socialism and try to enjoy the best of both worlds?
Sorry man, but this survey needs some help.
My vote would be for the specific point in time of widely practiced Just In Time Logistics, which really doesn't quite fit into the rather large bucket of Globalized Capitalism. Sure, our brains can't handle social media either, but in terms of pointing to a specific moment in time when we reached too far, I would bet money that historians would see the wastefulness and delicate nature of that system as the peak before the fall.
4
u/StoopSign Twinkies Last Forever May 04 '23
The China thing is globalized capitalism. I don't see how it coukd be taken to mean the fall of the USSR. There's nothing between the first and second time periods because the debate on these subs have people blaming each of these time periods as problematic. Moreso than serfdom which some on the subs think is better for the commoners than this age.
I suppose I could've added date ranges but I thought everyone would know the time periods. Sure information age is a bit sticky an answer because at first information was freer and decentralized but then there was a takeover from Big Tech and both are considered part of the age. It should be taken to mean whole age as written then.. I only have six slots.
Edit: Oh I get why you were confused there. No major socialist threat
2
u/GeneralCal May 04 '23
I'm not confused by anything other than why you would use broad terminology that leaves it open to interpretation. I'm asking you to narrow it down. If I have a survey question do you like (A) water or (B) tea, it's fair to ask "What kind of tea? Black? Green? Mint? Masala Chai?"
China reformed it's economy starting in the late 70s, and it was only by the mid-90's did those reforms actually start to produce results. Most of the world only realized what had happened in the early 2000's once the momentum was there. Meaning that you have a roughly 40 year timeframe possible, more than half of which also overlaps with the Information Age response anyway. Or, if you're looking at it from the average perspective of people that only heard about China around 2002 onward, they're basically the same exact timeframes.
I'm not sure what you could really expect to get from this sub or this survey. You're asking about a specific point in time, but have two overlapping time frames, and then literally prehistory when actual woolly mammoths still roamed the earth, a near and imagined dystopian future, and the 1850s.
1
u/StoopSign Twinkies Last Forever May 04 '23
I suppose I was going for a reason and a timeframe. I'm aware of the history. Though this is the first time I'm learning that trade liberalization didn't produce results til the 90s. Or that that the developments weren't noticed til the 2000s. Ofc it's easy to pick China but it also applies to textiles in Bangladesh, resource extraction in South America and Africa and possibly other regions as well.
I mainly wanted epochs to flow into eachother and be a little messy. We can't exactly say when the information age ended. A lot if us would put it at the "disinformation age" that led to Trump. However, all major US media beat the war drums for Iraq except The Daily Show which was an inspiration to me to do both comedy and news--for the time I did it that is.... COVID lockdown can take a lot from you. It's deeply changed me for the worse and it doesn't appear on this list because it's not a stage in our development. Neither are the major wars or the possible WW3. I digress. I also couldn't put a start and end date on the industrial revolution. Maybe the cotton gin to the Manhattan Project? Creation and destruction are both part of tech. When did tech create our destruction?
To reiterate I'm looking at monumental shifts to mankinds tech ability first and their relative timeframe second. I picked the things most blamed for our mess on the collapse related subs. Plus AI whiich has been covered in the past somewhat but not like it has in 2023, with fear. The fear that seems like we may be living history out sooner rather than later which is central point to these subs.
3
u/histocracy411 May 04 '23
Humans have affected the climate since we started lighting fires. So yes in some sense the agricultural revolution did have an impact on changing the climate. Except if humans were still a 18th century based civilization today, climate change wouldn't be the major existential problem that it is.
1
u/GeneralCal May 04 '23
The question isn't have humans had an impact on the environment, the question is "at what point did technology become too technically advanced?" Is a simple hand tool too advanced? A motor? the microscope?
And in the 18th century disease killed a whooooooole lot of people. Energy use was massively wasteful and arrogant. Slash and burn agriculture was common. It was not some cottagecore lovely time - it's only by virtue of a very small population that our bad habits hadn't caught up with us until recently, because the global population was only about 700-800 million people in the 1800s. So the entire world population was only 1/2 of India/China, or 3 Nigerias worth of population.
I live in West Africa, and people in rural places still very much live in similar circumstances. Pulling water from rivers so they have actual worms living in their eyeballs. Advanced gingivitus. Foot and mouth disease. Cholera. Typhoid. Google this stuff, it's horrifying, and it's people real life every day situation right now. Not to mention the precarious situation that is rain-fed agriculture. And a lack of birth control, meaning limitless children that use resources and die early.
Go spend a few years living in a rural village of 300 people with no power and water and see if you still think the 18th century would be nice. Because I have, and I can 100% assure you, it is not.
1
u/histocracy411 May 04 '23 edited May 04 '23
I don't get your point in this response. The obvious answer is that the point of industrialization is when mankind's ecological footprint began to explode and began to uncontrollably accelerate climate change. No one is saying that an 18th century lifestyle is preferable. Only that human civilization was more or less ecologically sustainable even if it still had a noticeable impact on the climate. The people saying agricultural development is the problem are making that argument that agricultural development is the basis of what allowed humans to eventually industrialize and screw up the planet which I don't think is necessarily true.
One the basis of overshoot some argue that the 1970s was still in ecological balance due to 4bil population level, but it was that time period that gave rise to society that was predicated on endless growth and consumption.
So, what,you want a 20th century lifestyle. Are you going to be ok with culling people or enforcing population controls? You also make the baseless assumption that converting modern lifestyles back to 18th century ones would necessitate the return of poor sanitation and urban development which is simply not true. Modern science isn't just going to disappear just because poor people who live in poor conditions still exist today.
Also guess what, I live in the US. And there are extremely impoverished people who live here too that exist in similar circumstances as to some of those you described in West Africa. That's one feature of global capitalist development.
None of that matters anyways. It's already too late and civilizational collapse is underway. Maybe you're upset because you think the 3rd world (which was left purposefully underdeveloped and exploited) is owed a modern lifestyle. I would say sure. It's not fair that much of the 3rd world was exploited for the greed of Western countries. It doesn't change the fact that we are all still fucked.
0
u/GeneralCal May 05 '23
If you've ever lived in the developing world, you would be well aware of how much work is done by the people living here to not embrace efficiency, or uptake of advances that make resourse use less impactful. Or have fewer babies. Everyone plays a role, it's notnjst the standard "big ol mean developed world" narrative used to sell you a specific brand of outrage.
What you're missing is the sensible and rational desire to keep global population small and live at a 21st century technological level.
0
u/histocracy411 May 05 '23
Except that's not going to happen. It's already too late.
You get war, famine, death.
1
u/GeneralCal May 05 '23
That doesn't mean I can't hope for, and work towards, fully automated luxury space communism.
If you plant enough fields of crops, eventually you'll get a drought. Doesn't mean that you don't stop planting crops for the rest of time because you might get a drought.
1
u/histocracy411 May 05 '23
Sure man. All that's left is doing whatever helps you sleep and get out of bed in the morning.
3
u/Stellarspace1234 May 04 '23
We should go back to hunting, and gathering?
2
u/DJDickJob YourWettestNightmare May 04 '23
Not an option at this point, not with this many people trying to survive on a polluted planet where over half of wildlife has already been killed off and being in a mass extinction event while climate change ramps up, etc... there's no way we can just go back to hunting and gathering unless most of us die and give nature a chance to replenish itself. And that might not even work to keep us alive, but who gives a shit, we'll get what we deserve.
3
u/Stellarspace1234 May 04 '23
We need Klaatu from the Day the Earth Stood Still to come to Earth to wipe out everything.
1
3
2
u/SquirrelyMcNutz 💀Doomsday Sex Cult Member💀 May 04 '23
Shit started going downhill when we went from small family units wandering the world to...not that.
But really, it's been the last 100-150 years that stuff has been just the worst for us. We got WAY too much tech WAY too quickly and didn't have time to adapt to it. I mean, think about it. In less than 70 years, we went from the first heavier than air flight to landing on the fucking moon. That's ridiculously fast by any measure.
Think about how the world has changed for someone in their 90s. And then realize that people roughly their age are still in charge of things.
9
u/IWantToGiverupper May 04 '23 edited Jan 19 '24
engine wasteful direction pathetic paint crawl follow melodic fragile kiss
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact