I refuse to be enslaved by my cell phone.

[hunter]

18. I'm some kind of Luddite and proud of it.

"Advanced" technology doesn't have to be things like smart phones or electric cars.

I readily accepted compact fluorescent and then LED lighting. I'm replacing compact fluorescents with LEDs as the fluorescents fail. (We still have a few fluorescents that are fifteen to twenty years old and won't die...) To me LED lighting is advanced technology. Professors Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura, the inventors of this technology, rightfully won a Nobel Prize.

Automobiles are loathsome, one of mankind's most deadly and destructive inventions. We ought to be doing everything we can to end this automobile age. If somebody gave me a Tesla I'd give it away in a heartbeat to someone who cared. Same with a smartphone. All this shit ends up as toxic waste. These are not advanced technology from my perspective. They are increasingly complex but regressive technology. (I might change my mind about smartphones if they'd quit building them as disposable consumer goods.)

The first real computer operating system I used was BSD Unix, that was in the late 'seventies. This was elegant and advanced technology and it still is. The last Microsoft product I used was Windows 98SE. Then I switched to Linux, which was like coming home. There is nothing Windows or Apple machines offer that appeals to me. Apple and Microsoft machines are maddeningly complex and bloated technologies, but they are not advanced technology. Throwing thousands of engineers at a problem doesn't make an advanced technology.

Robotic space exploration is an advanced technology. Manned deep space exploration, beyond earth's protective magnetic field, is just a stunt. We went to the moon. We know that space beyond the protection of earth's magnetic field is very hostile to human biology. What else is there to know? I'm cynical in spite of my grandfather who was one of the engineers who built the Apollo spacecraft. Some of his metal is on the moon and in the Smithsonian, but I'd much prefer all of our deep space exploration budget pay for increasingly sophisticated robots. Space belongs to our intellectual children, biological or mechanical, creatures that can walk on the martian surface naked. There's no good reason to send ordinary humans to the moon and beyond. Been there, done that.

Creating vegetarian menus that appeal to people who are not vegetarians is an advanced technology. Factory farmed pigs are not. Organic agriculture is an advanced technology. Drenching everything in herbicides and pesticides is not, especially as we watch the rapid evolution of pests and weeds to resist this kind of agriculture.

I "embrace the now" because what other choice do I have? But I don't have to tolerate the bullshit. Most new technology is bullshit that's not "progressive" in any way. That's a fundamental problem of our economic system. This thing we call "economic productivity" isn't productivity at all, it's a direct measure of the damage we are doing to earth's natural environment and our own human spirit.