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feralive OP wrote

The main issue I have with it is it makes false promises by claiming everyone in the world will have free and equal access to technology and that somehow no hierarchy will be created between the people who "choose" to augment / genetically engineer themselves / their children and the people who don't "choose" to.

It ignores the undeniable fact that resources are limited and rapidly declining - That it would require immense energy to keep people alive in the cloud forever.

Post-scarcity is industrialist propaganda - a dangerous lie that we can just consume as much as we want forever and everything will be fine as long as we say we're left-wing.

And it likewise ignores the glaring reality that creating a "superior" race of humans that live forever and have incredible abilities won't create a brutal hierarchy.

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RedEmmaSpeaks wrote

It's why I like the ideas behind Solarpunk so much better. Too often we wind up in debates about technology, and it always seems to get reduced to a simplistic dichotomy where we can either have our amazing tech and all it brings or go back to living like caveman. The idea is ludicrous on the surface. It assumes that we have an all-or-nothing choice in all this.

But there is no reason it has to be like that, no reason we can't take the old and marry it with the new. Hold onto what works, but jettison what doesn't. Clinging to traditions without thought is stupid, but completely throwing all ideas out the window without bothering to study them is stupid as well.

For example, when it comes to medicine, we can hold onto what we've learned regarding germ theory and antibiotics, but try to figure out how to implement them in a way that demands fewer nonrenewable resources. Germ theory is easy enough; just wash your hands frequently and throw your tools into boiling hot water.

So much of our problems and our discussions center around how we can't have that or we must have that, but that's sloppy thinking. A smarter approach would be, "Okay, how can we use this more efficiently?" Like rather than constantly produce new gadgets, we can accept that we've produced a shitton of them and rather than do all the work involved to make more slightly upgraded models, why not cannibalize old versions for parts, see if we can figure out how to make it work for a newer model?

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