Going Nowhere ...

From:

http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=181535

"Also, technology has made people helpless to help themselves. When anything goes wrong they have to call in an ‘expert’ to do the repairs. This is a fearful world. That feeling of helplessness; that feeling of unpredictability (elsewhere I decried the determinism of classical physics, but this is the wrong kind of unpredictability); that feeling of having no control whatsoever over things."


1) It all goes back to the fact that there is so little real work left in a Technological Economy - Society that the corporations (and all kinds of organizations (government and not) and others), in order to create some activity must load all manufactured entities with never ending dependencies, complexity, software (otherwise how are you going to keep those thousands of programmers and software engineers busy in all those corporations for 8 hours a day every day ?). And this just complicates everything, everything becomes indirect, everything becomes an "obligatory path" otherwise you could revert back to a simpler device but they all make sure that nothing is backwards compatible, nothing can go back to simple basic functions, it is either all or nothing and you have to guess the right combination of "all" and so forth. This also makes everyone and everything ever more dependent on the software and engineers designing this stuff, so they too become obligatory, they become a fixed dependency, you are forced to depend on them otherwise they would not be needed (and in fact 99 % of modern software and systems are truly almost useless crap, they are just there to make you depend on someone elses work that is useless but you are forced to abide too otherwise all those workers could be dumped in a heartbeat and so on).

2) Until the 1980s you could learn a skill set and apply it to fight matter - hardware, to fight the real constraints reality opposed us as in when you could repair color TVs with an oscilloscope and such: but this is no longer the case, now you fight against other people and their choices, and the crystallization of their will power in hard wired designs of software and functionality that was chosen arbitrarily just because, as standards, not as real physical constraints but as expressions of remote will powers and remote people deciding that devices and machines and software and systems must operate according to some arbitrary quirk choice (also implying the dependencies on those corporations or standards and the power struggles associated with it, look at the legal fights between Samsung and Apple and such). A modern color TV is full of black boxes (huge ICs) that no one on earth has the faintest idea what they could possibly be doing, it is all a black box now, but that is how the manufacturers want it, nothing can be understood you must be under the thumb of others in all cases. Windows has billions of bytes of software, how is that even conceivable ? after all, it just has to really do just a few things (capture position of mouse and call a function according to where it is and such, no big deal), totally insane complexity hiding a simple power struggle, a simple will power opposing you.

3) You can never develop any kind of skill set of any value anymore in modern technology, since everything always changes and the skill set just consists in knowing the right passwords, the right combinations of numbers to enter and such (like the right version of Java on what machine with what libraries and so on, like JAVA is the programming language that you use to write over and over again the same things that doesn't work on any machine and the language is always being changed and so forth, always being updated and nothing works and in the end you are really just wasting time chasing other people's will powers and design choices and ever changing minds and standards and so on). So in essence you will always be obsolete, you will always need new training and all of what you learned is already worthless since today you just need to learn the right combination of numbers that are valid for a week and then next week all the numbers have changed again and so forth. Obviously there is no real skill needed, no accumulation of talent or know how, you are just forced to always learn new idiotic crap that goes nowhere. Instead an analog designer of a few years back could build up a nice skill set that could be used over and over again, now nothing can be used over and over again and such.

From:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=173035

"Another thing I noticed in the last few years is how a lot of technology has really peaked and we are essentially fighting against other people, their decisions and will power and not against matter - physics and natural limitations: if you designed or repaired a color TV in the 1980s you were fighting against physics by creating circuits and designs to optimize electronic functions, it was an objective kind of activity, everyone that could contribute, contributed as in the accumulation of knowledge, as a serial labor activity, as in labor accumulates and creates more results and wealth, as a "common good", in that each invention or perfection led to better results: today a digital TV system is just an aggregate of arbitrary designs and systems all decided by other people according to standards according to their free will, you essential fight against other people and not against nature. "

APE STAR