Choosing not to use a technology - impossible?

[Ikranosphere]

Originally Posted by Moco Loco

What's not true? Please explain. Do you mean to say facebook is bad for everyone, that it makes everyone forget their afk lives? Besides being wrong, that's something you can't know from a single perspective anyway. If anything, facebook reminds me of my afk life more than I would be reminded if I didn't use it.

I don't know it from only a single perspective but from many more. Or else I would not speak about it, so that makes a lot of sense. In case you didn't noticed, or noticed but you ignore it, social networks are one of the many ways to control masses. Use Fb or Twitter or whatever you want, for all I care, just saying my point of view.

[Human No More]

Originally Posted by Ikranosphere

I don't know it from only a single perspective but from many more. Or else I would not speak about it, so that makes a lot of sense. In case you didn't noticed, or noticed but you ignore it, social networks are one of the many ways to control masses. Use Fb or Twitter or whatever you want, for all I care, just saying my point of view.

How do you 'control masses' exactly? There are a lot of dubious points, primarily datamining, but not 'control'...

Originally Posted by Moco Loco

What's not true? Please explain. Do you mean to say facebook is bad for everyone, that it makes everyone forget their afk lives? Besides being wrong, that's something you can't know from a single perspective anyway. If anything, facebook reminds me of my afk life more than I would be reminded if I didn't use it.

Exactly. It's the best way to keep up with AFK people.

As I already said, after it was publicised, asking for profile details has stopped as they are outright breaking both the law and Facebook's terms. That's something to complain about specific companies for dodgy hiring practices for, not the site in general. If they asked for your login here, would you say that's ToS' fault too?

[Moco Loco]

Originally Posted by Ikranosphere

In case you didn't noticed, or noticed but you ignore it, social networks are one of the many ways to control masses.

Everything you do has some amount of influence on your life, but influence isn't the same as control, at all. Facebook can't make me do anything.

[Stanley_9875]

Technology gave us cars... Cars take us from place to place, gives to some luxury, others speed, others a point A to point B contraption... cars also need maintenance and care. Some give mechanics and DIY'ers hours of headaches and smashed fingers

Computers make things easier for a lot of us... they hold information, give us information, endless possibilities... but like cars they need maintenance and often times fixing leading to frustration and money spending

Technology has helped us and cursed us

For those who love cars its a love and passion same with computers and other sorts of technology... gives people jobs and entertainment

technology is a lot of things

Just pointing that out

[Clarke]

Even trivialities like mathematics and abstract language are "technologies" in a sense.

[Cyvaris]

Oh great...Clarke has been unleashed upon this thread.

[Niri Te]

There are actually times, (rare) when Clarke and I agree.

[auroraglacialis]

The point was not to start another discussion on if technology is bad or good or neutral - but just looking at a single fact and that is that it is very very hard for a person even in only a loose affiliation of society to go about his business without participating in the technologcial trends to some degree. Life without a cell phone, facebook, twitter, a TV, a computer, a car or travelling by plane is quite a challenge - and not simply because these things make some things easiert, but also because society adapts to these things and consequently makes life without these things harder. The examples are numerous - try taking a horse and buggy and use it to get into the city - thats impossible and probably even illegal in those places that have other technological means. Try calling someone from within a city without a cellphone in a time when public phone density is as low as it was at the beginning of the 20th century. Using a bank account without a computer or cellphone is more expensive and some banks do not offer this at all anymore. Local stores are closing in favour of less dense larger stores, increasing the need to have a car because you cannot walk there anymore. These are just examples on how the adaptation of certain technologies changes the society in a way that makes it really really hard for those who do not want to participate in them to actually follow that choice. To go even more "primitive" - it is now next to impossible to start and live "off the land" and it simply is impossible to do hunting and gathering, except maybe if you are really rich. Thats because water is not safe to drink anymore, the land is all used for cultivation, hunting and fishing laws require considerable amounts of money and buerocratic efforts and living without a permanent residency or to build a small semipermanent residency on public land is prohibited.

My point was not to say that all this is bad and evil and all that (though I may actually see it that way), but to point out that the argument of people saying "If you do not like (cars, cellphones, facebook, cities) you do not have to use it" is BS because it is not really a free choice. The choice is similar to what our physics teacher used to say - that if you frop this little ball from the table, it would have had the chance to levitate - quantum mechanics allows that - but chances are you never will see this happening because even if some of the atoms in it actually try to move up, the whole rest of them pulls them down. Sort of...

[Niri Te]

I don't see quite that bad here it the Stares, for someone who. Chooses to go totally native.there are many places in the western hemisphere, where if someone had the skills, they could dissapear and stay "gone" for as long as they chose. They would have to be experts at woodsmanship and accomplished bow hunters as well, but they COULD DO IT. The thing IS though that VERY few non Natives have the skill set to pull it off.

[Human No More]

Originally Posted by Niri Te

There are actually times, (rare) when Clarke and I agree.

I have to agree here too. Technologies can be abstract concepts. Using shelter can be considered one.

[auroraglacialis]

Well yes and no, Niri Te. I think in some places in the world some things are possible. Probably places like the Arctic mostly. But in many othere places at least one thing has to be considered - a prominent enemy - humans. Because hunting and trapping or fishing is in the end poaching if you do not give some authority money, setting up a home in some place is squatting and if it is not very very mobile, the bulldozers will come. Sadly also in many parts there are no clean rivers anymore (and fewer fish than ever in these rivers). So I think it would really not just take the skills to be a nomadic craftsman who can hunt and fish in secrecy but also one would have to do this in settings where it is even harder (Northern Canada for example or Alaska) and one possibly would have to deal with the people that originally live there as well. And there is little in between - you could not easily do something like a horticultural seminomadic live.
So I guess what I want to say is that renouncing any sort of technology - be that cell phones, TVs, cars or something more profound like industrial agriculture, agriculture itself, concrete houses, gas stoves, ... - to go and stop using any of this is harder than it was for people at the time when that particular technology was not there yet. And not only because of the skills - a 19th century person would really have trouble living a 19th century lifestyle in most places nowadays and a native American probably would really have trouble living from the lifestyles different bands of them had in the past - be that living off the abundant salmon runs in the Northwest ("so dense that a pebble thrown into the river needs minutes to reach the ground") or off vast herds of buffalo in the plains ("thundering by for days without end"). The difference between drinking clean water from a river and putting a basket into the river and take it out filled with fish and using special equipment to purify water before working with a fishing pole for hours to get a couple of fish is quite large I think. The more modern example I used was that with public phones and cellphones - before cellphones, public phones were everywhere. Now they are almost gone. Before, you could without a cellphone call people from many places - nowadays you cannot anymore... The environment is reshaped in a way that makes it much harder to live in it in a way that is not using all of the technologies available (even if that technology is clearly not good).

[Niri Te]

There is one more climate other than the Arctic oeya tsmuke, I used to live on my Sailboat in the South Pacific. Find one of the many thousands of uninhabited islets in the south Pacific, and drop anchor. Jump over the side with your Speargun, and in five minutes, you either GET or BECOME dinner. Mobile? I could stay at a different islet, or atoll every week, and NOT use them all, before I went to live with Eywa.

[auroraglacialis]

That sounds pretty cool indeed (Well except the becoming dinner ). No need for much of land to cultuvate which is great. You'd need some money to get a decent boat and to keep it running, but I guess if you have some sort of pension or such it would work out. How long did you do that and what made you move away from that?

[Niri Te]

Ateyo and I have to go to our old Veteran friend's place for several hours, but when I come back, I will answer your questions for me.

[auroraglacialis]

Here is another really good short article on this topic (in a way, mostly it focuses on surveillance by technology, but it also explains that one can hardly avoid this technology) by famous security technologist Bruce Schneier:

Opinion: The Internet is a surveillance state - CNN.com

Basically it says that evedn if you, under great expense and social/economic cost manage to get rid of most of the technologies that can be used to track you, it is next to impossible to become completely free and unsurveilled, as other people will still help to track you. As he said - Orwells fictional dictators would be proud of this...