Technology The Neo-Amish Movement: How To Preserve Tradition in a Technological World

[DarthOne]

The Neo-Amish Movement: How To Preserve Tradition in a Technological World

Our third child was born about five weeks ago and we felt it was time to get out of the house and do something fun with the kids before summer passed us by. So we got in the car and headed to Lancaster, PA or as many call it "Amish Country." Growing up Lancaster was a spot we visited often as kids. I have great memories myself from those visits and wanted to give my kids those same memories this summer. It was also a refreshing and inspiring look at what is possible with a homogenous traditional Christian culture and society.

It's certainly intriguing to explore alternative lifestyles that choose to limit or reject the adoption of new technologies. The Amish community, known for their simple and self-sustaining way of life, has long fascinated those like me who are seeking a deeper connection with tradition and nature. Many people wrongly believe that the Amish swore off "all technology," but this couldn't be further from the truth. The Amish certainly use technology. A wagon is technology. A plow is technology. We may consider these to be "outdated" tech, but they are still technology nonetheless.

These technologies are viewed as practical tools that enhance their self-sufficiency, yet they consciously draw the line at adopting more complex and potentially disruptive advancements. At some point in time a few hundred years ago the Amish decided that they weren't going to adopt technology beyond its existing state. It's admirable and honorable that they have been able to hold to this decision, cultural tradition and way of life. I think there's a lot we can learn from them as we reach a point with technological "progress" now that is going to start eroding our very humanity.

Originating in Europe during the 16th century, the Amish trace their roots back to the Anabaptist movement. Seeking religious freedom and a simpler way of life, the Amish migrated to North America, with the first settlements established in Pennsylvania in the 18th century. Remarkably, the Amish community predates the formation of the United States by several decades, making it one of the oldest communities on the continent.

Contrary to the modern notion of an aging population or declining communities, the Amish are experiencing a remarkable surge in population. In fact the Amish are projected to take over the current US population in 215 years if their growth rate continues on pace. This growth can be attributed to a combination of factors, including a high birth rate, low attrition rates, and a deep sense of community. The Amish population doubles approximately every 20 years, highlighting their resilience and the appeal of their way of life to younger generations.

I often ponder the possibility of a Neo-Amish movement, where individuals embrace a deliberate halt in technological progress beyond a specific point, opting to resist certain advancements in the pursuit of a more balanced existence. This doesn't mean we all become farmers and get rid of our cars and electricity, but rather that we place a firm line in the sand with technological advancement amidst the rise of the transhumanism agenda.

Drawing inspiration from the Amish way of life, the concept of a Neo-Amish movement emerges. This movement argues for a deliberate halt in technological progress beyond a specific point to ensure the preservation of core human values and prevent potential societal upheaval. The Neo-Amish movement encourages critical evaluation and resistance against technologies perceived as encroaching upon fundamental aspects of human experience, autonomy, and privacy.

Let me give you some examples.

Brain implants and other intrusive technologies that interfere with cognitive or physical functions raise valid ethical questions. Such interventions can undermine the essence of human identity and autonomy. They blur the boundaries between man and machine. By resisting these technologies, a Neo-Amish movement aims to safeguard the distinct human experience and ensure the preservation of individual freedom.

The rise of autonomous vehicles and the potential for them to be controlled entirely by software brings forth many concerns as well. Given the susceptibility of software to hacking and vulnerabilities, many people rightfully question the reliability and safety of autonomous systems. By choosing to opt out of technologies that compromise their security, Neo-Amish adherents can maintain a sense of agency and mitigate the risks associated with technology's unchecked progress.

The recent emergence of mRNA vaccines has sparked global discussions about their effectiveness and long-term effects. Within the Neo-Amish movement, individuals may choose to resist these vaccines due to concerns about their rapid development and potential unknown consequences. This stance reflects a desire to tread cautiously when it comes to medical advancements, emphasizing the importance of thorough research, informed consent, and a commitment to natural healing methods. This approach is panning out very well for the Amish today with existing vaccines.

"The Amish are a perfect example of a large group of people who are largely unvaccinated," testified Steve Kirsch to the Pennsylvania State Senate. "You won't find kids with ADD, with autoimmune disease, with PANDAS, PANS, with epilepsy. You just don't find any of these chronic diseases in the Amish. The US government has been studying the Amish for decades, but there's never been a report out to the public. After decades of studying the Amish, there's no report because the report would be devastating to the narrative. It would show that the CDC has been harming the public for decades and saying nothing and burying all the data."

The Amish community's story is one of remarkable perseverance, resilience, and unwavering commitment to their principles. As one of the oldest communities in North America, the Amish have not only withstood the test of time but continue to flourish in the modern era. Their rapid population growth and steadfast dedication to their way of life demonstrate that they are more than a historical relic; they are a living testament to the endurance of human values and community bonds.

The idea of a Neo-Amish movement invites contemplation on the role of technology in our lives and prompts us to question the potential consequences of unchecked progress. Many of us are already participating in this movement without even realizing it. While the Amish community provides a foundation for this movement, the Neo-Amish perspective urges us to carefully consider the technologies we adopt and their impact on our humanity, privacy, and autonomy. As society continues to evolve, the exploration of alternative paths, such as the Neo-Amish movement, encourages critical thinking and the pursuit of a balanced coexistence between tradition and progress.

As I've written about earlier this year our focus at Gab is on empowering people to speak freely and gain access to information about homesteading, homeschooling, and homemaking. In order to help with this goal we've partnered with our friends at Plain Values magazine to syndicate their content on Gab News. In 2012, the Miller family began the Plain Values monthly print magazine stemming from a simple discussion about how to share stories of mission and ministry work with their Amish community. It's a great high quality magazine and I recommend a subscription. We are using the technology we've built here at Gab to expand their mission even further and help our community learn about homesteading, homeschooling, and homemaking directly from the people who do it best in the process.

Similar to the Amish, at Gab we believe technology is tool that can be used to improve real life, not replace it. When technology transforms from a tool into a crutch for real life that's a problem. We're not trying to implant computer chips in your brain, get you in a self-driving car, or ship you on a rocket to Mars. We simply want you to speak freely and by doing so come to the realization that you can and will get out of the Matrix, not further into it.

Andrew Torba
CEO, Gab.com
Jesus Christ is King

 

[Lord Sovereign]

The Luddite approach is geopolitical suicide.

And Torba is a raving lunatic.

 

[DarthOne]

The Luddite approach is geopolitical suicide.

And Torba is a raving lunatic.

Did you actually read the essay?

 

[Husky_Khan]

I'll read the rest of it later but that graph (and his implication that Amish will overtake the US population) did make me chuckle...

 

[Zyobot]

An interesting essay, and one with points that I sympathize with from time to time.

Problem is... I think we might actually place ourselves in a more precarious position, by shunning various forms of post-industrial technology apart from the essentials (such as cars and electrification, as Torba notes). Like it or not, things will get more wired up and interconnected to the point where those who ignore them — instead of, say, trying to reverse-engineer them and come up with their own "decentralized" alternatives — will be outmatched, outgunned, and eventually blindsided by Globalists and foreign nations who've gone all in on high tech and will inevitably use it to bludgeon those who've opted for the "simple life" into submission.

Not saying we all need to live in smart homes, or can't introduce more "naturalistic" practices that achieve the same result without as much artificial baggage. Maybe we should have more permaculture and agroforestry to reduce our dependence on pesticides and intensive conventional farming, for example.

Even so, I'm still of the opinion that shunning high tech beyond the essentials won't stop bad-faith actors determined to roll out the latest AI model or 5G network, anyway — and may, in fact, leave "Neo-Amish" communities with less countermeasures and timely responses. Luddism won't help win the coming arms race, is what I'm saying; even if the only way to win is not to play, the decision to play has already been made for us long ago, so it's too late to back out now.

Given this, the only viable path forward that I see that doesn't end in the Neo-Amish becoming the Tokugawa Japan to the Globalists' West is "Crypto-Anarchism" that empowers us to decentralize the means of production and exchange, while still having sophisticated alternatives — 3D printing to counter gun control, cryptocurrency to counter fiat money, and Alt-Tech to counter censorship (as Torba himself recognizes) — to the centralized infrastructure and surveillance networks they'll green-light, with or without our input.

 

[Zyobot]

Bit of an addendum:

For as much as he misses the "geopolitically competitive" angle to keeping up with the Globalists, I'll at least credit Torba for not being a total pacifist. Apart from anything else, nothing in there indicates that he advocates self-disarmament akin to what the actual Amish practice.

So, unless future generations of "Neo-Amish" shy away from guns, too, they're probably not helpless in the event they need to hunt, ward off predators, or carry out self-defense against run-of-the-mill criminals. Probably to their benefit, honestly, as I'm guessing the pacifistic, self-disarming actual Amish would be among the first to be strong-armed by more aggressive, well-armed players in an actual "Everything goes to Hell!" scenario.

 

[TheRomanSlayer]

I could imagine that the possible lifestyle of the Neo-Amish movement would resemble that of human civilization that is depicted in Turn A Gundam, where there's still automobiles and machinery, but the lifestyle is practically pre-WWI era.

 

[Bassoe]

I'm guessing the pacifistic, self-disarming actual Amish would be among the first to be strong-armed by more aggressive, well-armed players in an actual "Everything goes to Hell!" scenario.

To be completely fair, that might be their plan. In the event of madmaxworld, wait for a warlord to conquer them and essentially become feudal peasants, trading a percentage of their harvest for "protection" from "taxation" by rival warlords or getting pillaged down to their seedstocks by hordes of starving urbanites?

 

[Zyobot]

To be completely fair, that might be their plan. In the event of madmaxworld, wait for a warlord to conquer them and essentially become feudal peasants, trading a percentage of their harvest for "protection" from "taxation" by rival warlords or getting pillaged down to their seedstocks by hordes of starving urbanites?

I think you're overthinking the extent to which people plan that far ahead.

Besides, I doubt it'd be wise to bet that a beneficent warlord protecting them is more likely than starving hordes of urbanites pillaging them for everything they've got. Even then, the beneficent warlord may be deposed or overthrown by someone worse a few months or years down the line, leaving those counting on their protection out to dry once the next boss comes along.

So, at best, what you've suggested makes a pretty dubious plan. Most likely, it's simply the Amish being genuine pacifists than long-term planners who live in perpetual fear of a real-life Mad Max scenario. Very poorly thought-out if that's their plan, really.

 

[King Arts]

There is a problem many of you are not noticing with the neo Amish movement. The benefit the Amish have is community and self reliance, they have their own farm land that can grow their own food so they aren't reliant on super markets, they also can cut down wood to build houses together. So they could hypothetically be independent of the American economy if it went "digitial" Some things you would be able to copy, but the problem for example with refusing to buy self driving cars for example is that unlike the Amish you don't have your own "car factories" to build your own. If society for example stops selling cars that aren't driven by AI what will you do? Sure you can keep the one you have but how long will you be able to maintain it? And that's assuming they don't ban those type of cars.

Bit of an addendum:

For as much as he misses the "geopolitically competitive" angle to keeping up with the Globalists, I'll at least credit Torba for not being a total pacifist. Apart from anything else, nothing in there indicates that he advocates self-disarmament akin to what the actual Amish practice.

So, unless future generations of "Neo-Amish" shy away from guns, too, they're probably not helpless in the event they need to hunt, ward off predators, or carry out self-defense against run-of-the-mill criminals. Probably to their benefit, honestly, as I'm guessing the pacifistic, self-disarming actual Amish would be among the first to be strong-armed by more aggressive, well-armed players in an actual "Everything goes to Hell!" scenario.

Amish do have guns, they hunt. They just don't kill humans won't even do it in self defense.

 

[Cherico]

There is a problem many of you are not noticing with the neo Amish movement. The benefit the Amish have is community and self reliance, they have their own farm land that can grow their own food so they aren't reliant on super markets, they also can cut down wood to build houses together. So they could hypothetically be independent of the American economy if it went "digitial" Some things you would be able to copy, but the problem for example with refusing to buy self driving cars for example is that unlike the Amish you don't have your own "car factories" to build your own. If society for example stops selling cars that aren't driven by AI what will you do? Sure you can keep the one you have but how long will you be able to maintain it? And that's assuming they don't ban those type of cars.


Amish do have guns, they hunt. They just don't kill humans won't even do it in self defense.

While this is true, there are ideas we can copy from them.

You can take what works for your situation and discard what doesn't and no body is going to get it right the first time.

 

[Bassoe]

I freely admit I don't understand John Michael Greer/William S. Lind/Rod Dreher variety of neo-amish retroculture. If I'm getting this right, the arguments being made are:

• Industrial civilization, including both the promise of modern quality of life and the cyberpunk dystopian nightmare the oligarchy are trying to create, is doomed. Inevitably*. The resources are running out and between their demonstrated incompetence and preference for financial scams instead of actual engineering, the oligarchy won't be able to build the proposed borderline-scifi technologies to replace them in time**.
• Therefore, the objective of the neo-amish ought to be to build their own breakaway civilization using proven low-tech means which won't run out, then once the rest of civilization collapses from Peak Oil, be in possession of rudimentary low-tech infrastructure of their own capable of sustaining them. If they can somehow survive during the great malthusian check until the majority of the population who were only fed by industrial shipping and agriculture finish starving to death and stop stripping everything in their path like locusts, they'll have exactly the world they wanted.

This seems flawed to me for several reasons:

• The oligarchy's cyberpunk dystopian nightmare might not just self-destruct of its own incompetence
• I kind of like living in a technological civilization and the benefits it provides me. Not inevitably going extinct with the next cosmological Outside Context Problem alone ought to justify it.
• Moral objections to any plan treating 99% of the population dying as an acceptable outcome.
• That the whole ideology seems custom-built to not pose a threat to the ruling oligarchy. "Don't act, we'll collapse on our own in two more weeks" and "only use low-tech means while we don't likewise limit ourselves" are sus.

*

What if that future we were promised was always a lie? What if that future was never physically deliverable, due to dwindling natural resources, stagnant technological development, and a growing population of elderly and disabled people drawing welfare?

What if the Elites simply decided that they'd prefer forcing the population into digital ID/social credit score/Agenda 2030 serfdom over being guillotined in a revolution when all these complex, interlocking, and fragile logistical systems providing us with our bread and circuses inevitably failed? What if all these world leaders trying to genocide us have all been given the same briefing; that the future would look like some cross between Mad Max and Waterworld unless they took drastic measures to curb overpopulation?

This is why I always caught heat while debating people on SB. I always took a pessimistic view of the future. I saw it, a whole decade ago. I saw the writing on the wall. We wouldn't have flying cars. Quite the opposite. The future of transportation would be the ordinary bicycle. Our commutes would be replaced with working from home over the internet, with energy-sipping VR goggles (and eventually, brain-computer interfaces allowing direct access to a metaverse) replacing energy-guzzling motor vehicles. Our homes would basically turn into prisons. Drones would bring us the groceries, but other than that, we wouldn't have personal cars, and we wouldn't have airlines. The expanded world of international travel and tourism would shrink back down again to pre-industrial provincialism. The cosmopolitan globe-hopper would cease to exist, and with him, our basic liberties.

Servitization would replace property ownership, with people paying rents to make use of things owned by giant asset management companies. Home ownership would disappear completely. People would become service industry meat for the local feudal lord, the scope of their concerns limited to whatever pleases their masters most. Enlightenment-era thinking about man as a rational animal would backslide into medievalism, with a new, rebranded Divine Right of Kings, just with people in lab coats instead of crowns and furs. Disobedience towards the managerial elites would be punished with prompt debanking, homelessness, and outlawry.

** This may be correct, see the Fermi Paradox for evidence.

 

[JasonSanjo]

I'm not personally familiar with the authors in question and so cannot speak to their line of reasoning, however a repeat of the 1859 Carrington Event (or an even stronger eruption), taken together with our presently much weaker geomagnetic field, would result in the near-total destruction of the electrical grid along with anything electronic that happens to be connected to it at the time. This is because just like the telegraph lines back in 1859, the electrical grid acts as a receiving antenna, which allows enough energy to be absorbed to overload and potentially destroy the system - except the modern electrical grid would work as an almost ridiculously more effective receiving antenna than the old telegraph lines, resulting in far more energy being absorbed all at once, especially relative to what the system can actually handle without knocking out power and taking severe structural damage.

As late as 2012 a "Carrington-class" eruption was observed, but thankfully was aimed away from Earth. These things happen semi-regularly, and frankly it's only the vastness of space resulting in a low hit-ratio that has kept Earth safe. Going by statistics alone, the likelihood of us getting hit with another Carrington-class (or higher) event is 1.0, or 100%, over time. And if that happens to coincide with a weakened geomagnetic field (like today), modern civilization is fucked.

For comparison, a 2013 study using data from the Carrington Event estimated the cost in damages to the U.S. alone in case of another Carrington-class event would be $600 billion to $2.6 trillion ($698 billion to $3.02 trillion today). However, that study assumed a geomagnetic field strength equal to the one in 1859... which is not even close to correct, unfortunately. And we could just as well get hit with a significantly stronger eruption, to boot.

A culture that doesn't rely on electricity would fare much better in such a situation.

 

[Bassoe]

Carrington events are just another case of an Outside Context Problem which would destroy our whole civilization and which we've theoretically got the technology to bypass, but since it'd be very expensive to build the bypassing infrastructure and we wouldn't necessarily need it at any point until we really needed it, it'll never get done. It's having the capacity to deflect a dinosaur-killer asteroid all over again, same situation, NERVA rockets and mandating all essential infrastructure be faraday caged, complete with massive infrastructure spending to modernize everything are both things we could do but won't.

 

[JasonSanjo]

OCP or not, between the weakening geomagnetic field, the historical frequency and the looming changes in solar activity, the chances of Earth getting hit by a Carrington-level or more destructive solar eruption over the course of the next 100 years is well over 90% - some would even say it's over 99%. Hell, some astronomers and astrophysicists are convinced it's going to happen in the next 20 years or less!

Meanwhile, the chance of us getting his by a killer asteroid over the same time period is... a fraction of a fraction of a single percentage point.

From a purely statistical standpoint, in the short-term doing everything we can to prepare for a destructive solar eruption as quickly as possible makes perfect sense. Preparing for a killer asteroid? Not so much. In the long-term it makes sense to prepare for both, however one is a helluva lot more critical than the other.

As for how this relates to the subject of the thread: a hypothetical Neo-Amish movement wouldn't survive a killer asteroid any more than anyone else, but it would survive a destructive solar eruption with minimal trouble... at least until the ravenous hordes of starving technophiles start showing up.

 

[PsihoKekec]

The Luddite approach is geopolitical suicide.

And Torba is a raving lunatic.

Tell me you didn't read the article, without telling me you didn't read the article.

The concept has it's merit, we are crossing the threshold where certain technological advancements are harmful to humanity as whole (mRNA vaccines, unbridled AI development...), a society that refuses such developments might suffer adversity in short term, but would be in a better position once these advancements bite humanity in the ass. And I'm not talking hypothetical cataclysmic event, even now the Amish are much healthier than overall USA population and lead much happier (yes life of agricultural toil can be happier than clickmouse job) lives. Our current technological advances are making us less healthy (what percentage of food in your supermarket has no added sugar, corn syrup or soy) and more dysfunctional. Are we willing to suffer technological discomfort to be more healthy and more connected to people around us?

Problem is that the wast majority of people in Western world are addicted to comfort and refusing any kind of technological advance is seen as threat to comfort. For the same reason people are unwilling to do more than just grumble about the immigrant invasions, because cessation of third world importation might reduce the comforts in short term (it certainly will in long term).

 

[DarthOne]

Tell me you didn't read the article, without telling me you didn't read the article.

The concept has it's merit, we are crossing the threshold where certain technological advancements are harmful to humanity as whole (mRNA vaccines, unbridled AI development...), a society that refuses such developments might suffer adversity in short term, but would be in a better position once these advancements bite humanity in the ass. And I'm not talking hypothetical cataclysmic event, even now the Amish are much healthier than overall USA population and lead much happier (yes life of agricultural toil can be happier than clickmouse job) lives. Our current technological advances are making us less healthy (what percentage of food in your supermarket has no added sugar, corn syrup or soy) and more dysfunctional. Are we willing to suffer technological discomfort to be more healthy and more connected to people around us?

Problem is that the wast majority of people in Western world are addicted to comfort and refusing any kind of technological advance is seen as threat to comfort. For the same reason people are unwilling to do more than just grumble about the immigrant invasions, because cessation of third world importation might reduce the comforts in short term (it certainly will in long term).

I’m reminded of an exercise meme I once saw that went something like “know the pain of discipline or the pain of regret”.

 

[Bassoe]

I'm not personally familiar with the authors in question and so cannot speak to their line of reasoning

John Michael Greer: Author of a substack and a few books about how technological civilization is doomed because of peak resources and not being able to manage expensive long-term projects without short-term payoffs like building alternate technologies. Well-researched, disturbingly plausible and as good an explanation as any for the fermi paradox.

William S. Lind: Author of the novel Victoria of Spacebattles infamy*, a book about a "retroculture" revolution against the American goverment. Even if you agreed with the politics, which I don't, it's simply not a very good book, the characters are cardboard cutouts and situations contrived so the protagonists always win regardless of plausibility. Clay Martin's Wrath of the Wendigo does the same general plotline better, but without shrilling the author's homemade retroculture ideology.

Rod Dreher: Author of The Benedict Option, a political treatise in which he proposes that the right has lost the Cultural War and should withdraw to isolated compounds as independent from the rest of civilization as possible, to wait for the rest of civilization to collapse under its own contradictions. The fact that this has been unsuccessfully tried is disregarded.

The concept has it's merit, we are crossing the threshold where certain technological advancements are harmful to humanity as whole (mRNA vaccines, unbridled AI development...), a society that refuses such developments might suffer adversity in short term, but would be in a better position once these advancements bite humanity in the ass.

This logic is flawed, insofar as our not using said existentially dangerous technologies won't make the slightest difference, given that the status quo will use them and either become all-powerful against us or accidentally cause some kind of scifi-tier apocalypse.

Or to put it another way, spite is a very real motive.

If biotechnology development is a choice between:

• Economics make transhumanism mandatory and transhumanism means inescapable enslavement. As soon as transhumanist augmentation reaches the point where the augmented make more effective and therefore profitable employees than baseline humans, getting augmented becomes essential to getting hired, like a collage degree today. But thanks to planned obsolesce and subscriptions rather than actual ownership, being augmented inevitably means becoming terminally dependent on the companies selling your augmentation.
• Give your hypothetical future offspring the following modifications, as many upgrades to intelligence and as much instinctive understanding of statistics as can possibly be crammed into the brain, reprogram the kin-selection threat mechanism to take into account hypothetical future descendants reaching forward as far as the first mental improvements can extrapolate and treat perceived potential threats to them equivalently to perceived potential threats to existing family and other monkeysphere inhabitants, fix the misalignment in reproductive instincts that rewards the sex act rather than having produced offspring and increase tendencies toward paranoia, aggression and xenophobia. I know what'll probably happen as soon as the cloning vat is decanted, but it'll be totally worth it from a Selfish Gene point of view, the children of whoever does this first will rule the world.

...and AI development is a choice between:

• The rich use regulatory capture to monopolize AI, so once AI advances sufficiently to consume the entire job market, everyone else is priced out of everything and revolts are violently suppressed by weaponized robots, leading to everyone but the rich starving to death followed by their enjoying post-scarcity utopia built atop our mass graves.
• Everyone has AI, meaning it gets weaponized against the rich. Either by successfully Aligning it yourselves to have it defend you, or as Swordholder-style deadman switch MAD deterrence blackmail, threatening to Unbox an AI you deliberately Misaligned to "kill everyone" or "turn everything into paperclips" if the rich don't share the benefits of post-scarcity utopia.

...plenty of people are going to choose the second options in both cases, despite doing so being riskier for humanity as a whole.

And I'm not talking hypothetical cataclysmic event, even now the Amish are much healthier than overall USA population and lead much happier (yes life of agricultural toil can be happier than clickmouse job) lives. Our current technological advances are making us less healthy (what percentage of food in your supermarket has no added sugar, corn syrup or soy) and more dysfunctional. Are we willing to suffer technological discomfort to be more healthy and more connected to people around us?

Problem is that the wast majority of people in Western world are addicted to comfort and refusing any kind of technological advance is seen as threat to comfort. For the same reason people are unwilling to do more than just grumble about the immigrant invasions, because cessation of third world importation might reduce the comforts in short term (it certainly will in long term).

It's more than that. Personal aside, but I have family who require immunosuppressant medication to keep a transplanted organ viable, so the unavailability of technological civilization/logistics would literally guarantee their death. Understandably, I don't like this and any ideology which promises it, from Schwab's pricing the former middle class out of civilization to the environmentalist fanatics to Lind's SCA Khmer Rouge knockoff.

* The total collection of fanfiction endeavoring to rewrite the setting to make sense, follow different ideologies or simply pit the Victorians against other fictional factions in the most one-sided curbstomps since the turians in the last first contact war spite thread are now drastically longer than the actual book.

 

[Husky_Khan]

I don't think that mandating the "limitation" of technological progress is all that practical. One would need a monopoly over Human society to engage in such behavior.

It's better to have more traditionalist and conservative viewpoints in Big Tech and other areas where they make the advances and developments concerning such things and that is basically just another reason why the focus on the Culture Wars is so important. So Torba actually mentions things like homeschooling and whatnot so he kind of touches on it.

The other thing Torba touched upon is stating that technology is becoming a crutch as opposed to a tool, I'd agree. It's been widely reported that even parents in Big Tech companies often limit the screen time their kids have because they know firsthand how debilitating it is and that is something that should be encouraged. But LOTS of Conservative and Traditionalist commentators have been talking about things like less screen time for kids, and in fact it's basically a generalist message now though when the mainstream media discusses it, it tends to be hypocritical as they go on to celebrate it in the very next segment.

A Neo-Amish movement with artificial limitations on technology again seems like a non-starter. It seems more practical to behave as say... the Mormons by and large, or Evangelical Christian and Conservative Catholic or Orthodox/Conservative Jewish community members do. Look at how Conservative divestment from Big Tech as is already affected society. You won't stop dangerously rampant technological progress on an international level by divesting from it. Traditionalists need their voices heard in every level of the decision making process.

I celebrate the fact he created Gab and that it's still a sustainable social media platform after all this and I'm glad there's a platform where people can have a version of free(r) speech including marketing killing/censorship banning inducing stuff like antisemitism and the like. But from what little I've heard of him and his opinions, it's been a lot of raving that I've been exposed to.

 

[Marduk]

I freely admit I don't understand John Michael Greer/William S. Lind/Rod Dreher variety of neo-amish retroculture. If I'm getting this right, the arguments being made are:

• Industrial civilization, including both the promise of modern quality of life and the cyberpunk dystopian nightmare the oligarchy are trying to create, is doomed. Inevitably*. The resources are running out and between their demonstrated incompetence and preference for financial scams instead of actual engineering, the oligarchy won't be able to build the proposed borderline-scifi technologies to replace them in time**.
• Therefore, the objective of the neo-amish ought to be to build their own breakaway civilization using proven low-tech means which won't run out, then once the rest of civilization collapses from Peak Oil, be in possession of rudimentary low-tech infrastructure of their own capable of sustaining them. If they can somehow survive during the great malthusian check until the majority of the population who were only fed by industrial shipping and agriculture finish starving to death and stop stripping everything in their path like locusts, they'll have exactly the world they wanted.

This seems flawed to me for several reasons:

• The oligarchy's cyberpunk dystopian nightmare might not just self-destruct of its own incompetence
• I kind of like living in a technological civilization and the benefits it provides me. Not inevitably going extinct with the next cosmological Outside Context Problem alone ought to justify it.
• Moral objections to any plan treating 99% of the population dying as an acceptable outcome.
• That the whole ideology seems custom-built to not pose a threat to the ruling oligarchy. "Don't act, we'll collapse on our own in two more weeks" and "only use low-tech means while we don't likewise limit ourselves" are sus.

*

** This may be correct, see the Fermi Paradox for evidence.

Bingo. This is a guess at the future by people who clearly aren't doing their best to make it even an educated guess, tinted by pre-made conclusion and sourness (somwehat understadandable with the disruptivness and sheer complexity involved) against economics and technologies they struggle to understand.

"Running out" of any particular resources has lots of quirks, intricacies, technological dependencies and often even politics, with lots of ifs and buts involved. Technically, on atomic level, resources that aren't nuclear fuels can't physically run out because the same atoms still are somewhere out there on the planet, the only issue is collecting them, and the bigger problem is usually collecting them in an economically viable way.
If anything, neo-amish are in no way more immune to such problems, and possibly less, as hey are not eager to get major new ways of discovering, extracting or repurposing resources.


And then there is the golden grail of technological civilization, increasing its "catchment area" for resources to the a large portion of the solar system, then all of it, and then multiple solar systems, making them practically unlimited. Elon Musk likes to bring up that logic a lot.

And yeah, unless they have some secret forcefield technology squared away, absolutely nothing makes wannabe low tech survivor communities inherently immune to the death throes of the industrial world, and stubborn belief in own immunity to them is no substitute for that. Just because you don't understand how autonomous combat drones work, don't want the technologies that make them possible, and hate the idea of them existing overall, does not help you even a tiniest bit to fight someone else's autonomous combat drones.
Many parts of third world live in similar or even more primitive ways, often not by choice, and in these less peaceful and lawful areas it often ends... poorly for them. As in criminal gangs just wiping out whole settlements for being in the way of their particular illegal business.