The first, and also the most futuristic techno-utopian one, is the colonisation of Mars. Elon Musk founded Space X in 2002 (Peter Thiel was the first outside investor) with the idea of re-founding humanity. It’s all there: the call to save humanity by turning it into a multi-planetary species, the desire to start from scratch without the legal constraints of Earth, and the will to break with the established order. As you can read, half-hidden, on the terms and conditions page of the Starlink service owned by Space X:
The parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities.
Very intelligent article in terms of painting a richly detailed picture. Falls short in reality awareness tho.
For example, it’s easy for people like the author who are immersed in using information tech to imagine everybody lives that way, but about 2/3 of all jobs still involve working directly with physical objects and materials. Of the 1/3 of jobs that could be done entirely online, only about 1/3 of those actually are. The author mentions that we also interact with our personal lives solely through electronics - to communicate with each other, manage our schedules, our lists, etc - but we used to do most of that on paper. Electronics didn’t replace direct interaction with reality, it just replaced paper and pencil.
Recognizing this takes most of the wind out of the author’s sails. Silicon Valley, the label they seem to lump modern technology in general under, which most people see as a handful of IT companies, didn’t start this phenomenon of insulating ourselves from the real world. We’ve had telephones and radio for about a century, paper for centuries before that, and all kinds of powered or motorized appliances and other conveniences all our lives. How many of us still have living relatives who ever depended on fire-based lighting or animal-powered transportation, for example?
Anyway, tl;dr I think this article is a fine example of stylishly writing up an interesting and stimulating point of view, which doesn’t really have a solid basis but is written well enough to convince many readers that it’s insightful.
Paper and pencils aren’t access points to infinite dopamine. Paper and pencil don’t have algorithms so disgustingly invasive they detect when a teenage girl uploads and then immediately removes a photo. Recognise that as self-conciousness and bombard them with cosmetic advertisements to sell to her. Paper and pencils aren’t 50% owned by a company that profiteered out of stealing your user data and selling it to Amazon. Who then used their gains to purchase every single emerging technology company in the world. Alphabet bought Google Maps, They Purchased Google Earth, They acquired the company that became Google Glass, they bought Google Sheets and android is just a fork of the Linux Kernel that they blocked the root directory from the User. Then they added spyware to each of them and have been collecting mass amounts of Data on every human being in the world ever since. Do not equate this to paper and pencil. Look what tech did to the Taxi industry, look at how it’s decimated the restaurant industry. Forbes has predicted a 50% drop in global GDP to occur sometime between 2070-2090. Humanity has never been addicted to paper and pencil. This is not paper and pencil.
You make a good point.