[bdbenton]

The Great Train Robbery (1903) ends with one of the bandits pointing a pistol at the camera and shooting. Apparently, this also disturbed audiences so deeply that they got up and ran out of the movie theater. This is more of an urban legend than anything, as mentioned in the article, but it goes to show the emotional power of new technology.

It reminds you of Clarke's third law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I still remember the ominous feeling of receiving an unsolicited, location-based mobile notification from Google requesting a review immediately after leaving a local restaurant. Digital surveillance works by some unseen "magic" to most users, which is more dread than horror, like a hacker posting your IP and location out of nowhere just to freak you out.

[TMWNN]

>I still remember the ominous feeling of receiving an unsolicited, location-based mobile notification from Google requesting a review immediately after leaving a local restaurant. Digital surveillance works by some unseen "magic" to most users, which is more dread than horror, like a hacker posting your IP and location out of nowhere just to freak you out.

Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human interstellar civilization thousands of years in the future, in which superluminal travel is impossible (for the humans), so travelers use hibernation to pass the decades while their ships travel between star systems. Merchants often revisit systems after a century or two, so see great changes in each visit.

The merchants repeatedly find that once smart dust (tiny swarms of nanomachines) are developed, governments inevitably use them for ubiquitous surveillance, which inevitably causes societal collapse. <https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255>

[bazoom42]

> This is more of an urban legend than anything (…) but it goes to show the emotional power of new technology.

What does it show if it didnt actually happen?

[aintmeit]

Exaxtly. It's only mind-games.

[aintmeit]

Near/far/wherever you are...

[nopenopenopeno]

Clarks third law or whatever just reminds me of how “progress” is a religion in the liberal west. It’s not an observation but a declaration of some silly standards which are nonsensical to any mind not indoctrinated to the delusions of elite western liberalism. On top of that, it’s also outright pompous.

[thfuran]

Clarke's Third Law is... pompous?

[zdragnar]

I suppose if you read the inverse of the law, there's a tenuous thread connected to the notion that progress is a necessary step to disabusing our illusions of nature and how the world works. The risk is both assuming you know more than you do because you "believe in science", as well as devaluing things in the natural world because they do not fit into whatever notion of advancement is in vogue.

We often see valuable discoveries come from some area that was previously overlooked. There's not enough there to demand any sort of cute phrase but just enough to discourage the notion that a society with some advancements over another has nothing to learn from the other either.