>>727643
>Theodore Kaczynski, the socialist and murderer
>Jacques Ellul, the PoMo Marx french theorist, protestant and top star for people who masturbate to Debord
>>>/twitter/
Besides the problem of wherefrom these people are coming, what are these observations supposed to mean?
The Industrial Revolution is a revolution for a reason, and as a transitory period, it has been for the better; that is, a necessary stepping stone to the information eras.
Furthermore, that conception of mental health that Kaczynski reviles makes more sense if you are familiar with Aristotelian telos, via Aquinas and then generalise these as mental processes encoded in human brains that cooperate.
Ellul also makes it sound as if big "E" efficiency and big "T" technology are diaboli ex machina that area evils and forces by just going in circles.
Ellul's concerns of education producing reliable (tax, debt, and wage) slaves really only applies to modern democratic State education. Fritzer, et al. cite Nietzsche in the identification of the problem of uniform eduation. I posit a market solution to loose the stranglehold of such a monopoly, comprised of parochial, hyperreal, vocational, and filial elements.
To the original question; Before you play the card, technology without an agent is value-neutral. McLuhan noticed technology's power to amplify and accelerate the values and trajectory of a society. Sesame Credit amplifies the Chinese spirit of Mandarin bureaucracy and state-worship.
It only forms a threat when the enemy holds the trigger.
The material luxuries and comforts are simply how a liberal system evolves. Never before in the history of human organisation has such a perfect system to appease its subjects been created. Otherwise, Singapore would not have had buggery laws within the corpus until a couple years ago.
>The current globalized system is all about speed, efficiency, and status.
And is that problematic? This only occurs because the human neural computer has not developed info-security protocols resistant to continually evolving semantic magic created by Google's advertisement AI or mani-pedied Buzzfeed blockheads. That's on the parents.
To your stupid pine-tree tier point about value-positive technology, that is not intrinsic to technology as its own body but rather a context-sensitive element. Those mass inventions are transitives for greater goals and even past this skewering, they are Catherine-wheeled onto existing moribund state-corporate structures. Liberalism (of the 17th and 18th century) uses technology (past the 19th century) for its own aims. Those people on their phones, smartwatches, Alexas, fridges are just much more effective and feature rich versions of the everyday billboard. A digital HIV versus a paper rhinovirus, creating massive socio-psychological botnets. Why else would China want to have TenCent and Alibaba and Sina Weibo? It's not the technology is different, but the topology of its ecosystem.
Back to McLuhan, there is no community because he would say social medias obsoleted physical proximity, replacing it with hyperreal atomised existence. It's psychological DDoS, 51% attack, and D&C via consensus breaking.