I generally agree that technology alone won't solve problems by its own very often. But technology can change societies fundamentally. The control of fire, the wheel and electricity are some examples. A recent one is the internet. It may strenghtend (some) power structures, but it weakened some as well.
Evaluations of social impact are inevitably subjective, they depend on what aspects of society one considers fundamental.
There were a handful of technologies that did change society in fundamental ways. Perhaps the development of agriculture is the best example: it tied people to the land, and that had a profound effect on all aspects of society - property, inheritance, marriages, settlement size, houses, roads, water and sewers ... Horse riding was another one: it led to societies that subsisted by plundering other societies, vast kingdoms and empires, mobile armies, ....
I doubt whether fire had that much an impact, at least in pre-historic times. Looking at the surviving hunter-gatherers, it seems that fire makes a material difference but is not fundamental. I believe that if those people somehow lost the technology, their lives would be harder, they may have to change their territory and diet, and may dwindle in number; but their way of life would not change substantially.
But fire certainly allowed humans to extend their geographical range, and became fundamental over millenia as it was an ingredient in other technologies, like ceramics, metallurgy, chemistry etc..
Ditto for electricity: its first large scale application was lighting, and that by itself it did not change society much: it was merely a better replacement for gas lighting, which was only an improvement on oil lamps and candles. Later inventions based on it did have some impact -- although not always as much as one may expect.
Cinema had a bigger impact on society than electric lighting: it changed people's goals and ideals around the world, the way they spent their sunday evenings, the way young people dated... Radio, TV, recorded music --- they had a large commercial impact, but I can't think of any fudamental social change that was directly caused by them. As distributors of information, I doubt whether they were much more efficient than newspapers. Even as instruments of centralized political brainwashing they were only mildly effective: to make a totalitarian state or a revolution one still needed an extensive pyramid of bullies and propagandists spread among the people. Perhaps the biggest impact of radio, TV, and audio technology on society was that it drastically reduced the time people spent with other people, and replaced it by the passive absorption of canned entertainment.
Electrical appliances like washers, refrigerators, and microwave ovens had a big impact by freeing women from domestic chores and making them avaliable for work outside the home. Refrigerators and cars also replaced the daily visits to many small local markets by weekly trips to a few giant supermarkets.
As for the internet, see above. The internet did not "fundamentally change society". It made many things much more efficient, from shopping to dating to learning sumerian. It replaced some industries by others, moved a lot of money from some pockets to other pockets. Killed more small shops (like bookstores) and department stores, and replaced them by huge centralized e-comerce stores. But, by and large, societies and governments all the world carried on without much change.
If you go out in the street and look at the real things -- houses, buildings, roads, cars, clothes, hot dogs --- and don't read the ads, you will hardly see anything that you would not have seen if internet had never been invented. Almost everyone that I know still works, lives, travels, etc. pretty much as they would if there was no internet; a little better, more conveniently, cheaply, faster -- but not
vastly better, can't even say
much better.
I don't know your age, but having lived through it I would say that the personal computer had much more impact on society than the internet; and the impact of the electronic computer itself was MUCH bigger still.
I also tend to think that a lot of social and political actions are necessary for a change to the better. But especially bitcoin can be seen as some kind of a catalysator. There were ongoing protests against the structures of banking before bitcoin became well known. And the adoption of bitcoin itself can be seen as a kind of protest. The creation and adoption are social acts - and they have effects. [ ... ] It won't solve every problem, but maybe it helps to solve some. And even if it fails, it was a nice try. Or if the outcomes (like the vanishing of banks and governments in total) are not as projected (which they won't...), I tend to think that it is hard to get worse than now. [...] To make the argument clear, I think that technology just never stands alone. It is always embedded in some social-political context and the usage is often a social act in itself (and sometimes also a political one).
I can agree with that, basically --- except that I would say "crypto-currencies" than "bitcoin".
Not everyone is here solely for the purpose of making money.
I understand that. However, I have the impression that owning some bitcoin drastically changes one's estimates of probabilities and discourse. It is a very human weakness, I am afraid I would succumb to it too... That is why I am following Marc Andreessen's example.
And of course technology helps to gain freedoms that governments deny. For example, the Tor-network gives people in China the possibilities to inform themselves without censorship. Bitcoin helps people in almost every country to buy illegal substances (not that the technology would be necessary, but still).
People who use Tor in China are presumably at risk of being tracked down and punished; if so, I bet that most Chinese would rather not use it. So it is stretching things a lot to say that "Tor has liberated people in China from news censorship".
Indeed, during the Arab Spring revolts, the Internet may have helped the repressive governments to track down dissidents, more than it helped the dissidents themselves.
As for illegal drugs, using bitcoin may be more risky than paying cash on delivery. Indeed, if the police seizes the drug dealer's emails (or if the dealer is a lamo), the blockchain can be used to prove in court that the client did pay for a drug sale, thus validating the email and voiding any claim by the client that he changed his mind before completing his part of the deal.
You want to bet a pizza and a beer that bitcoin will be at a higher price level a year from now and therefore prove to be a good store of value, investment and hedge on inflation? Name your time frame. Name your toppings. I think you'll be eating crow.
I bet only when I believe I am right and the other guy is wrong. I do not bet for gambling, when the odds are 50-50 or impossible to estimate (as is the case with bitcoin prices).
A guy who invested in a game without knowing the odds made a bad investment --- even if he happened to win the jackpot. If you do not agree with this, we have a language problem at least.
Are you honestly suggesting that black markets don't exist?
Black markets are generally irrelevant, in terms of quantity and of social impact.
Are you really ignoring that the internet fundamentally changed society and is the reason the protests and revolutions from 2011 on are even possible despite the wishes of local dictators?
Computer nerds like me, who spend their day glued to a screen, like to think that the internet played a central role in the Arab spring and other revolts of 2011. There is no lack of intenet pundits that will gratify our egos by repeating that.
But that is bullshit. The revolts were made with people going out to the streets, people unhappy with their lives, people angry about the deaths of friends and family. With mobs and guerrilas, with machine guns and Tomahawks, with trucks and fuel, with foreign special forces and and mercenaries, with money, orders, intelligence. The internet may have helped a little, but mostly what it did was to give us, couch potatoes outside those countries, a voyeuristic taste of the action.
All considered, the internet failed even as a mere source of information for the outside world. Thousands of videos were circulated, millions of tweets were tweeted, but that storm of disconnected, out-of-context, and unreliable bits of data contained very little real information. I followed the Lybian revolt in particular, devoured all the bits and frames that I could get, but to this day I do not understand at all what happened there. The internet was better than the obsolete media, sure; but even a blank wall is better than that.
Posting about government in a way that reads "government is omnipotent" between the lines, and mentioning the French Revolution in the same post seems quite ironic indeed.
It is not. You cannot topple a government with a new wonderful internet protocol. You need a revolution for that.
(I wonder whether the French Revolution really happened, though. There was no internet then, how could they have done it?)
Stolfi trying to argue the internet has less impact than French Revolution, World War II, or the end of Apartheid... almost as bad as Richy trying to persuade us the world doesn't need roads.
My parents lived in Italy through most of Fascism and World War II. You arrived here form Mars in late september or early october/2013, did I guess right?
Equating the impact of the internet on society to that of WWII must be the stupidest thing I have read in this millenium.
