This is a great thread, as I am currently learning to program and I often ask myself, “what are we(programmers) all doing? And where are we(humanity) all going?”
I remember getting a variety of answers, but one engineer I met laughed when I posed this question and gave me one of the darker answers I heard, but it indeed resonated:
“We’re boiling the oceans while partying at the end of the world, what did you think we were all doing?”
Or something along those lines. I’d love to think new technologies, properly implemented (guided by pragmatic altruism), can get us out of the problem that technology, improperly implemented (guided by greed and misanthropy), got us into. But I just don’t see it.
Isn’t oil required to make any and all pieces of tech, even green tech? How much oil/pollution went into producing my phone? The plastic pieces on everything I consume, wear, etc.? The Electric Vehicle that will help curb climate change as long as I can afford to buy one and discard my old gas consuming vehicle that was running just fine and might for another decade if I take care of it?
There are solutions, and I’m probably not thinking deeply enough on this, but right now, in this moment, I’m highly skeptical that those in power, even if they wanted to, could ever find a way to make money while also actually fighting climate change in a way that actually prevents its worse effects.
A simple example is cars. The solution to car emissions isn’t electric vehicles, it’s better infrastructure based around trains, metros and better city planning that encourages cycling and pedestrians. But our thinking is that we can sell electric vehicles, and build planned obsolescence into those vehicles to keep capitalism rolling. You can’t do that as lucratively with rail, if at all.
We all nod our heads and then get back to work though, cuz due to a multitude of lifetimes lived reinforcing the “get yours, and fuck everyone else” attitude that is a requirement to survive in a capitalist society, we can’t do anything more than mumble and groan about it, but still go back into work on Monday.
Those of us who object too loudly are socially ostracized at best, and killed at worst, and those on the top count on the rest of us being just afraid enough to not speak too far out of line.