[2rsf]

You mean that before technology the world was a better place?

How far should we go? 1940's brought WWII and lot's of deadly tech so no, 1917 was WWI with its deadly weapons so again no, Antibiotics was discovered in 1928 and need a lot of tech to be manufactured so anything before that could be deadly, if we go forward we'll find very few news services which are mostly controlled by governments or other organizations so again not a great choice...

I agree that technology causes a lot of evil and problems but always think of things in respect to the alternatives.

[killtimeatwork]

It's a difficult question. Technology has made us into stupid, entitled sheep (most of us are narrow specialists in the work hours, entitled and clueless consumers during the rest of our time). It has severely weakened societal and human connections. It has introduced non-locality in the market, which in turn created a ton of human and animal misery (it's a lot harder to buy a non-ethically produced good if the factory is just 500m from your home and you personally know people who work there and are suffering). And, perhaps most importantly, it is just unsustainable - if we continue this techno experiment, the earth will be a total hellhole in a couple hundred years at most. Worst case, it won't be habitable by humans at all.

I think that, given where we are today (i.e. we've already, for better or worse, invented a huge amount of technologies), it would probably be wise to start with advocating heavy restraint in tech use. Electronics, as evil as their production is, give us the Internet, which in turn can educate and enlighten people who otherwise would remain ignorant. So perhaps using an old tablet or small laptop to browse the web for educational purposes is ok. The valuable sites tend to be small (no ads) and low-tech, so they don't require a ton of compute resources and don't consume much electricity.

As for antibiotics -perhaps they could be made at home? Pennicilin was accidentally grown by a guy in a lab. That sounds replicable in home environment. It was routinely done in Poland pre-XX at least - people would combine bread, spit and spider's web, leave it alone for a while and then rub it into e.g. combat wounds to combat infections. With our current level of knowledge, I'm sure could come up with a better procedure :)