this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
361 points (89.7% liked)
Technology
59742 readers
3000 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I was talking to my daughter yesterday about H. G. Wells and the one film he wrote the screenplay for, the 1936 film Things to Come.
In the film, a great world war starts in 1940 with an air attack on Britain (surprisingly prescient, but the rest isn't). The war lasts until 1970 until Britain is completely destroyed and petty dictators rule tiny patches of land in the wastes. But men of science return to Britain and rebuild it as a scientific utopia.
Wells was a scientific technocrat. He thought that scientists should be in charge of things because there was nothing technology could do that wouldn't eventually lift humanity up and bring about a paradise on Earth...
So why did he also write The Time Machine, where everything falls apart and humanity splits into two species, both unintelligent? Because he was also a socialist and he saw what capitalism and the class system was doing to the world (The War of the Worlds was also about this, a critique of Western colonialism).
So over 100 years ago, H. G. Wells was telling us that we were on a path to either scientific utopia or destruction due to our embracing old modes of thinking.
What would he have made of capitalists using technology to end civilization?