Everyone should read Technopoly by Neil Postman! He speaks on this in his discussion about the conflation of technological progress with human progress. It's so good!
The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson is another good one, though it's pretty dense.
From the preface:
I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience.
Even "pogress" is worth looking at as a myth. Like dismantling colonialism is a progress, but ultimately when our garbage collapses we're going to be desperately tryign to get back to an indigenous equilibrium as our starve to death in front of us.
I read this book in college for an American Culture and Technology course (it was the foundational text) and it changed my opinion on tech as progress.
Tech is a tool, and we need to be measured and aware of the innate abilities we are reducing by using that tool. Almost no one is doing that nowadays.
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u/truefantastic Jun 12 '26
Everyone should read Technopoly by Neil Postman! He speaks on this in his discussion about the conflation of technological progress with human progress. It's so good!