Sometimes it seems you have trouble discerning whether people are agreeing with you or not… you’ve taken a disagreeing tone with me before on several occasions when I was actually agreeing with you. The defensiveness I’ve seen in some of your posts (I’ve seen a pattern, but heretofore have left it unaddressed) does not need to accompany your arguments — let the truth speak for itself. Disparagement of opposing perspectives and dismissiveness only makes your argument weaker.

- Devin

I notice, for instance, that you never addressed some of our greatest inventions: the digging stick, the atlatl, etc. These things have very high marginal returns.

You seem to be trying to draw a conclusion that technology is bad, but your evidence seems to want to draw a conclusion that too much technology is unmanageable.

Or, to put another way, it seems akin to getting a tummy-ache from gorging on chocolate, and thus concluding that chocolate is a vile poison that no one should ever touch under any circumstances.

Wolf’s teeth will be limited by many factors and Even at their best, these teeth will be limitating factors for the wolf in many ways, including diet.

[…]

Relative to any other species, humans can rapidly adapt to live anywhere and eat anything due to tools and techniques that, unlike genetic advantages, can be adapted, created, and discarded rapidly.

So-called technology is also self-limiting, as we are witnessing in the current wholesale destruction of the planet resulting from the industrial age. It is quite clear that as the industrial age has increased the rate of human adaptation compared to the agricultural age, so too have the limiting factors become apparent at an increased rate. Should we develop functional and widespread nanotechnology, it is obvious that the limiting factors will manifest themselves in, well, nanoseconds.

That is also evident in nuclear weapons; the inherent destructive capacity is the reason they have not been widely deployed. (Yet. There’s no accounting for insanity. However it is interesting that LSD was isolated the same year that they split the atom. There is some merit to the old doctrine of signatures: a system that evolves a poison will evolve an antidote in proximity.)

Every “evil� attributed to technology is precisely a limiting factor of that particular type of technology. If our technology were sustainable, limiting factors would be slower to arise. I guess that is kind of the definition of “sustainable�: the comeuppance is slower. Less painful, if you define painful as a sudden backlash. “Good� ideas, like genetic evolution, just take longer to blow up in your face.

Simply: An adaptation’s limiting factors arise at a rate proportional to the rate of adaptation. “Artificial� technology is not evil, just quick.

Also applies to the introduction of foreign species to an ecosystem: sudden introduction, sudden backlash.

Fwiw, genetic evolution is sometimes faster than technology. Witness antibiotic resistance, which funnily enough is also considered evil, but only because it is faster than we are.

another issue to clarify- why do you, and by you i mean just the people on this board, not all anarcho-primitivists, choose the computer to communicate?

Using technology to decry the abuses of technology is a limiting factor of technology, made available by the technology itself. It’s a no-brainer, really. Poison, antidote.

…the essence of a computer is just a whole bunch of things you can turn on and off really fast.

Fast adaptation, fast backlash.

Sorry for long post

we know humans can be voracious hunters, and those Clovis points are desgined for one thing: taking down animals so big that sabre tooths can’t touch them.

Very true, and any new alpha predator is going to shake thngs up. But, there were people in North America before the Clovis, and most of the extinctions were well underway even before they got there. Obviously, a good hunter’s spear is going to be very good at hunting. But we’re talking about thousands of people, not even millions–much less billions. When I first heard the Overkill theory, I laughed, because how could such a tiny population wreak so much havoc? They must’ve been dedicated to it. I imagined weekly meetings of the whole human race, where they’d coordinate strategy. It would be like squirrels arguing whether squirrels are causing the mass extinction now.

the position i take in the overchill/overkill paper is a middle ground, that both were contributing factors to the Megafauna’s demise. we know humans can be voracious hunters, and those Clovis points are desgined for one thing: taking down animals so big that sabre tooths can’t touch them. in the same breath, a warming climate has been effectively argued to change Megafauna habitat to the point where resource scarcity causes increased inter-Megafauna competition and crowding out. the two aren’t by any means mutually exclusive, it’s just the scientists in this debate get overly defensive of their positions, acting as if to say “my theory is completely right, leaving no room for your opinion to be correct”.

here’s something nobody has mentioned yet…

“Another climate change factor to consider is its possible interferences with Megafauna reproductive cycles. With the increase in seasonality, the Megafauna’s characteristically long gestation cycle was made less practical. They depend on correlated environmental cues to determine mating season. Getting the time right is key, so that the offspring can enjoy birth during the most optimal period of the year. With increasing seasonality, animals must have spent time they on the reproductive cycle just getting insinc with the changing climate, which could lower the birth rate and contribute to the Megafauna extinction.”- me, from my paper

later

another issue to clarify- why do you, and by you i mean just the people on this board, not all anarcho-primitivists, choose the computer to communicate?

Gutenberg’s printing press changed the world. It sparked the Renaissance, and formed our concept of “the nation.” It was ideally suited for such autocratic measures, because it allowed a single author to dictate to a large audience uninterrupted.

In many ways, the internet is the opposite of that. We all read, and we all write. It is not the dictatorship of one author to many readers, but the collaboration of many reader-authors. That collaboration has lent the essence of the online medium to the birth of open source: a tribal technology if ever there was one. The ideals of open source are the same ideals of primitivism: openness, sharing, community, and the great project of building something together. Wikis, blogs, Creative Commons and open source software are all manifestations of that. That’s something we want to be part of, and something we want to support.

Finally, the barrier to entry is low. We can afford to publish online in ways we couldn’t otherwise. We reach more people this way, more effectively, and at lower cost. All in all, I would consider the computer a “good” technology, if only we could find a more sustainable and ecologically-friendly way to manufacture them. That’s by no means an intractable problem: the essence of a computer is just a whole bunch of things you can turn on and off really fast.