The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
I realise this is a review, not the actual text. But still. This is utter bollocks.<p>It&#x27;s typical of non-technical &quot;intellectuals&quot; to completely ignore the main areas of modern human progress, simply because they don&#x27;t understand them.<p>e.g. the whole discussion on Art completely ignores Video Games, which are undoubtedly Art, and also an area of rapid innovation and development. Yet they&#x27;re usually dismissed out of hand because no-one who takes &quot;Art&quot; seriously plays them or understands them.<p>The whole &quot;we went to the moon and never went back&quot; completely ignores the argument that the moon landing was, right from the start, an uneconomical publicity stunt. The exciting time is now, when space is starting to become economically viable and we have organisations making viable plans to colonise Mars.<p>The Internet is taken for granted as a method of &quot;chatting&quot;, and smartphones as a method of &quot;taking selfies&quot;. Again, because the author doesn&#x27;t understand what vast and wide-reaching achievements these are. Watching a Cambodian tuk-tuk driver watch a YouTube English lesson while parked up waiting for a fare is a modern marvel. Bringing communication and the spread of knowledge to anyone who wants it, wherever they are, is the most important thing to happen to humanity since the invention of agriculture. And yes, it&#x27;s as disruptive to human societies as agriculture: we should expect our societies to be disturbed by it.<p>The economic malaise is mostly a result of WW2. Europe was economically destroyed, and the US changed its entire economy to meet the demand (and the USSR moved its entire manufacturing base a thousand miles east in a year, an astounding thing to do). Recovering from that meant that growth was easy because it was coming from such a low base. We&#x27;ve hit the final point of that recovery, and growth isn&#x27;t so easy any more.<p>Not everything is perfect. There are some changes we need to make. But please let&#x27;s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. And to anyone writing about modern society: if you don&#x27;t understand technology, please stop fucking writing about it.