I think some of the social anxiety over technology is that we might be getting to the place where nuclear deterrents and mutually assured destruction might be climbing down from something superpowers worry about to something states, cities, and eventually individuals worry about. That's sort of where if we don't figure out how to tame the wild in ourselves we either don't make it or there's little choice for the powers that be, whether they hate the idea or whether it's the biggest relief ever, to eliminate democracy and give us an authoritarian system (probably some variant of the China model) instead.
I'm not familiar but it sounds like something I'd want to watch so I'll have to keep it in mind.baker wrote: ↑December 28th, 2020, 11:39 amHave you seen Scorsese's "The age of innocence"? He said it's his most violent film. To be sure, there are no gangsters in it and nobody gets killed, and no other graphic scenes either. No graphic depictions of poverty, disease, no foul language. It's a good example of how human brutality can take on many faces, looking perfectly civilized.
My most recent job, the one I'm still at, reaquainted me with the reality that there a lot of people doing their level best to essentially 'rape and kill by legal means' and so they'll do as much social, psychological, and reputational damage as their social credibility will allow to get rid of anyone whose a threat to them. My estimation - they're a minority that's about the size of the amount of people who do their level best to do everything right, just that it seems like the majority of people are in the valley between the two where they're just trying to survive and seem like they'll generally roll over to power - good or bad - wherever they see it. People have been bringing up the Milgram experiment, the average 65% rate of people who'll shock a person even to the point of damaging their health, or even after the subject complains that they have heart problems and that this is getting risky for their survival. That sort of dutiful following of authority made sense in a different environment, ie. where tribes had to be cohesive units in order to survive and where you also had to exile members who either didn't or couldn't obey the chief - and exile normally meant death either in the hands of other tribes or in the claws of large predatory animals. It's a great example of a structure that made perfectly good sense at a given point in human evolution but then fail us as we get to a point where we're neither under such harsh Darwinian pressures, nor are we in a place where our leaders the best and brightest our tribe can cough up but rather they're the people selected for by winning the highest quantity of zero-sum games.