No spoilers since we exhausted ourselves on Ghostwire: Tokyo, so we resorted to wondering when our Baldur's Gate III discs will arrive, and then rants ensued
Butch:
I find it ironic that old dudes like us are always the ones going "I don't want your digital bullshit! Give us our discs!"
Stop laughing at us, Bill Gates.
Loothound:
Dude, you're opening the door for a huge grumpy old man rant here. Rather than subject anyone to that, I'll just say that I'm more or less fully convinced that technology peaked around 2011. If you get a chance (and can), read the article The Uncanniest Influencers on the Internet.
Feminina:
Hey, righteous rants are totally acceptable blog topics, so when the old man energy is strong, we need spare no one.
Loothound:
I will rant a bit in a very bare bones fashion.
Technology has reached the point where large aspects of it are essentially like public utilities, in that people in our society can't be reasonably expected to function without them and there aren't many real alternatives to using them. However, they are not regulated like public utilities in terms of how they provide their service or how we pay for them. They get to operate from purely profit driven motivations without any accountability to the public good. Also, they are profiting not just in terms of money, but in terms of what they know about us. What they know about us can give them a tremendous amount of leverage over how we think and see the world, and they are given really wide latitude over how they leverage it. Technology, up to a point, generally increased our ability to manipulate the world. Technology now has the ability to manipulate us.
Feminina:
I've read arguments for regulating social media companies like public utilities, and I think they're interesting.
I don't disagree with any of this rant, and I think this technology is absolutely a lot more granular and personalized than previous technological innovations, though I also think that every new technology changes the way we see the world, and to some extent provides a means of manipulating us. The book I just finished reading (Robert Sapolsky's 'Determined') suggested that the invention of the printing press helped sustain decades of witch burning, because it was so easy to reproduce and spread the ideas of the 'Malleus Maleficarum'. Although copies of that book wouldn't have been directly handed to any person who expressed interest in other witch burning content, the way information basically can be now, it was still a huge change in the way that ideas could be shared and popularized.
I'm also idly thinking about a comparison with other conveniences-that-become-necessities of modern life, like electricity. Modern life doesn't really function without it, but there was a time when no one had it, and then a time when it was only in certain places (like high-speed internet now). And I don't know this history and don't have time to look it up this second, but I'm speculating that at some point early on there was So-and-So's Electric Company that would provide electricity in some coverage area if you wanted and if not you had other options including just sticking with kerosene lanterns which was still a not-weird choice, and so the electric company could do pretty much whatever they wanted and set whatever terms they chose because their service wasn't critical to the function of society.
But now it is critical, and so we have a regulated power grid. And I don't think anyone would say that this is a flawless system, but it does more or less ensure that most of society has access to the electricity needed to function, at a price that is set levels somewhere below bankruptcy. Maybe something along those lines will eventually set some boundaries on the internet free-for-all as well.
Or maybe deregulation will eventually allow us all to be bankrupted by our electric bills! You just never know.
Butch:
I say just get rid of social media. The only people who say that social media is a necessity are people who want you to use social media. I don't use social media at all, and here I am, just fine. Power and water and internet, those are different. Fuck social media.
Except wordpress. Please keep reading wordpress, everyone.
I just worry we all became too dependent on technology. Have to say, when I was on Maui and everything, right down to 911, went down, it was just another level of scary. I will always remember asking a cop what was going on and having him have no idea at all. A cop. I mean, if they don't know, if they were relying on technology that failed, if they had such faith in it that they had no back up....it was scary.
Live the gnome life. Live it.
Feminina:
I mean...yeah.
But also, we've always been too dependent on whatever technology we had, ever since we stopped just foraging, right?
We're way too dependent on oil right now. Years ago, we were too dependent on radio for communication. Before that, we were too depending on sailing ships. Middle-age farmers were too dependent on plows. Early hunters were probably too dependent on fire.
Anything that's critical to the functioning of a society as it is currently structured is something that will wreak terrible havoc if something happens to it, and there's an argument that we should try not to be dependent on anything in order to avoid the potential for havoc, but that's not possible. Any complex society is going to be deeply dependent on a lot of things, pretty much all of which are technology in the sense that we can't just pick them up off the ground.
Obviously, radio is easier to take down than a plow, and there are a lot of levels of technology, but I think logically it's a really hard net to unravel when we start saying "we should have this, but not this."
Butch:
Unrelated, but it adds insult to injury that my kid just finished BG3.
Grumble.
That kid has a hard time not spoiling anything, too.
Grumble.
Feminina:
Oh man, already FINISHED?
I bet he missed most of the good loot. Hardly counts as a playthrough.
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