this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2026
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I say both can cause problems.
Technology carries the risk of communities falling apart, because people do rely less on one another; technology makes peoples' lives and working more independently possible. Have a look at how many people were needed to plant and harvest crops per acre a hundred years ago vs. now.
I'm not saying this was a world I'd like to live in. I'm just saying that technology alone can have an impact on society, which should be considered and mitigated.
If you add widely unregulated capitalism into the mix, all is on overdrive and I agree that the current predominant form of capitalism is the bigger of the two problems.
The centralizing forces of turbo-capitalism would pose the bigger threat to society even without technology, because it puts too much power that can't be voted away easily in the hands of too few.
Another bad side of technology is that it inevitably requires more energy to run the machines as it advances, even as the machines become more efficient - they just get bigger to do more.
In the early days of computing, a valve-based computer would take up a space the size of a large classroom and had about the computational capacity of a scientific calculator. That was an incredibly powerful computer at the time. Now, we have that and 10000x more power on our smartphones that fit in our pocket, but the new incredibly powerful computers are the size of large warehouses and take orders of magnitude more energy to run.
Do they do way more? yes. Are they way more efficient in terms of watts/calculation? Also yes. Regardless though, they still require significantly more resources to operate, and the earth does have a finite energy budget, both in previously stored energy from fossil fuels and a "recurring" budget from renewables.
In the end, whether or not there is capitalism.... the factory must grow. People loathe stagnation and will pursue this growth regardless, because the motive is "we can't sit still". I wonder if that's an evolutionary leftover from nomadic hunter-gatherer times, where staying put means death.