I am currently wondering what a socio-culturally conservative person would hack in technology to influence culture. These kinds of people are generally disliked in intellectual circles like here because they tend to want to limit the freedom of other people, however, if you put that out of the picture for now and assume (unfounded, but whatever) that technology is more about increasing other people’s freedoms than decreasign them, you could say that the profounding sad longing people like G. K. Chesterton, Robert Nisbet (The Quest For Community), Wendell Berry or in a way even Tolkien had for the pre-modern era does not deserve being hated and we may want to take a look at it.
We can also see it the other way around: some technology could make some conservatives be more content with its cultural outcomes, and perhaps shut up, which may be a win for some liberals.
So let’s say someone, let’s call him John, wants to reinvent the good aspects of the Middle Ages (or, for the cynical: the imagined, romantic aspects) and not the bad (unfreedom, inequality, cruelty, religion) aspects, so how could technology be hacked for that purpose?
My first idea is John could work on 3D printing bringing production at home, so there is now more of a DIY culture, cottage industry, mom and pop shop, rural blacksmith kind of thing. Less of a need for a thousand people to commute to work in a factory, and people making things they need at home or being more experienced at programming 3D printing for a given purpose they play the role of the family-business medieval shoemaker.
How would this affect culture? By liberating people from employment, large chunks of the capitalism-socialism debate become obsolete. Communities are more self-sufficient and rely less on external factors, they can afford to be more conservative, they can be the Amish but with modern tech. You get something like medieval guilds.
John’s second idea could be to extend female fertility into the 50′s and 60′s or towards infinity. You could say The Pill created sexual liberalism. But by the same logic, the longer women have the choice to settle down with a man and suspend their careers for children, the more women will choose it. And this is a very uncontroversial way of doing it because it does not reduce women’s choices in any way. Conservatives never really opposed women doing some work as long as they are also mothers. Extend fertility toward infinity and virtually all (okay, most) women will choose to have both have working phases and motherhood phases, problem/debate resolved forever. I think such a technology would have a lot of support from feminism.
Then maybe John wants to have knights and feudalism. More specifically, he makes protective military technology, shield, armor, which is vastly more advanced than offensive weapons. The result is an aristocracy because the peasants’s gunshots will pling off their armor. Think Dune, but he also needs to make sure it protects from explosions and a whole house collapsing on his head and suffocating there or dying in a fire, um, not easy.
Or maybe John is are the more American kinds of conservative, more libertarian than feudal. American individualism comes from frontier culture, and to reinvigorate it he can work on extending the final frontier i.e. colonizing space. This is not even a new idea, writers like Heinlein expected precisely this from expanding out from Earth.
Please keep your replies value-free. What matters here is not whether what our imagined John is trying to do here is excitingly romantic or horribly reactionary, the question is simply whether it would work for his purpose or not. If you hate this idea, good: figure out how can you counter this kind of technology by other kinds of technology.
Interesting. Let’s get weird!
I am currently wondering what a socio-culturally conservative person would hack in technology to influence culture. These kinds of people are generally disliked in intellectual circles like here because they tend to want to limit the freedom of other people, however, if you put that out of the picture for now and assume (unfounded, but whatever) that technology is more about increasing other people’s freedoms than decreasign them, you could say that the profounding sad longing people like G. K. Chesterton, Robert Nisbet (The Quest For Community), Wendell Berry or in a way even Tolkien had for the pre-modern era does not deserve being hated and we may want to take a look at it.
We can also see it the other way around: some technology could make some conservatives be more content with its cultural outcomes, and perhaps shut up, which may be a win for some liberals.
So let’s say someone, let’s call him John, wants to reinvent the good aspects of the Middle Ages (or, for the cynical: the imagined, romantic aspects) and not the bad (unfreedom, inequality, cruelty, religion) aspects, so how could technology be hacked for that purpose?
My first idea is John could work on 3D printing bringing production at home, so there is now more of a DIY culture, cottage industry, mom and pop shop, rural blacksmith kind of thing. Less of a need for a thousand people to commute to work in a factory, and people making things they need at home or being more experienced at programming 3D printing for a given purpose they play the role of the family-business medieval shoemaker.
How would this affect culture? By liberating people from employment, large chunks of the capitalism-socialism debate become obsolete. Communities are more self-sufficient and rely less on external factors, they can afford to be more conservative, they can be the Amish but with modern tech. You get something like medieval guilds.
John’s second idea could be to extend female fertility into the 50′s and 60′s or towards infinity. You could say The Pill created sexual liberalism. But by the same logic, the longer women have the choice to settle down with a man and suspend their careers for children, the more women will choose it. And this is a very uncontroversial way of doing it because it does not reduce women’s choices in any way. Conservatives never really opposed women doing some work as long as they are also mothers. Extend fertility toward infinity and virtually all (okay, most) women will choose to have both have working phases and motherhood phases, problem/debate resolved forever. I think such a technology would have a lot of support from feminism.
Then maybe John wants to have knights and feudalism. More specifically, he makes protective military technology, shield, armor, which is vastly more advanced than offensive weapons. The result is an aristocracy because the peasants’s gunshots will pling off their armor. Think Dune, but he also needs to make sure it protects from explosions and a whole house collapsing on his head and suffocating there or dying in a fire, um, not easy.
Or maybe John is are the more American kinds of conservative, more libertarian than feudal. American individualism comes from frontier culture, and to reinvigorate it he can work on extending the final frontier i.e. colonizing space. This is not even a new idea, writers like Heinlein expected precisely this from expanding out from Earth.
Please keep your replies value-free. What matters here is not whether what our imagined John is trying to do here is excitingly romantic or horribly reactionary, the question is simply whether it would work for his purpose or not. If you hate this idea, good: figure out how can you counter this kind of technology by other kinds of technology.