[southernplaces7]

>“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” ― Aldous Huxley

It may have provided us with the largely unused means to more easily go backwards if we want to (for example, via nuclear or massive biological war), but the idea that it's made us worse off from some ideal previous state of lower technology is popular, fashionably nihilistic nonsense with no bearing on concrete reality. It was also just as stupid an idea in Huxley's time.

Anybody who thinks such a thing should really read more carefully on how nearly every aspect of life was in the past, even fairly recently, or if they have the means, go visit a society that today genuinely lives without using modern technology.

(pseudo-hippie communes of "like-minded" individuals that back up their cute experiments with modern industrial products, modern medicine and the ability to go back to civilization at any time, don't count)

[igor47]

This is an over statement. I, too, have read Slouching Towards Utopia and Steven Pinker. But (a) technology is not a monolith, it's clearly nice to have enough food and modern medicine while it's also terrible that we're destroying our biome or facing increased illiteracy due to social media. Also (b) technology, like beer, is both the cause of AND the solution to all problems. Harari and James C. Scott make compelling arguments about how agriculture, among the first widely adopted technologies, deprived us of a utopia that we're scrambling to recover with more technology ever since. I call this the Operation Cat Drop problem. See also Under a White Sky.