What the left needs is a fucking spine.
I would think any serious person worth their salt would take a luddite (by that I mean the values of the original bunch, not what the colloquialism has become) position and say that technology is as good as its implementation. If the technology makes it easier for people to do more in less time, thereby meaning that people can go do the fun stuff they enjoy doing, then absolutely. If, however, it’s implemented to drive down wages and therefore living standards, then it is not an advancement that we should seek to implement.
Saying the left is techno-pessimistic is, in my opinion, lazy.
Yupp, and that’s sadly a product of capitalism. For example, low load industrial robot arms with a default set of software can be bought extremely cheap nowadays. What the capitalist sees is not a robotic utopia, where people are freed from work and get to enjoy life more, but a labour force which is cheaper and more reliable than humans. They have no interest in making the world a better place. They just want to maximize profits.
Legislation worldwide is missing crucial time to find and enforce solutions for this.
Technology can be so beautiful, magical and immensely helpful to us. If we use it right. But given our current system, this is unfortunately barely the case.
I totally agree. Though, I think I would say that it’s less that legislation is missing time and more that since the neoliberal revolution, workers’ organisations (unions, parties, etc) have been so systematically either infiltrated or dismantled, there is no avenue for workers to put pressure on representatives to do this. Most governments are, in one way or another, bought by oligarchs.
Saying all that, it is good to see the resurgence of unions over the last 10 years. Though I question the radicalism and their grasp of the task at hand of many of them.
You mean SolarPunk?
I think what makes most people pessimistic is not technology itself, but the realization that it is always embedded in existing conditions and cannot change these conditions of its own accord.
The internet in particular has shown very impressively in the lifetime of many how quickly promising technology geared towards the common good can actually make life worse instead of improving it for everyone.
We do, it’s even got its own community.
