Did I catch you attention? Good! Now let me explain myself.
I was raised, like most good Americans, to believe in Progress (with a capital P). It was the American Way. But now, in my old age, I have to ask myself: is the world better now than it was fifty years ago? The answer, of course, is: yes and no. But if I were God, and could put all the ways the world has improved on one side of a scale, and all the bad things on the other side, the results would be obvious. The scales would tip so far everything would fall of off them.
Progress doesn’t have to be bad. But like everything else is has to be under our control, not the other way around. As it is, we are on a treadmill, where we have to keep running faster and faster just to stay in one place. Just to try to stay in one place, which is impossible because we keep changing the world with all our huffing and puffing.
This is not a cheerful thought, but it has a flip side too: once we understand what is going on, maybe we can to something else. Maybe. Maybe we could be skeptical about all this wonderful progress, and proceed more cautiously, instead of rushing headlong into the future. We might be running of a cliff - or into the ocean, like the lemmings.
Let me give you a personal example. I loved computers, software, and the Internet. I knew they were good. But I was fooled into spending much of my life serving them - or more realistically, serving the people who took control of them. And now, when I try to warn people about the dangers of computers, software, and the Internet, they don’t listen to me. They think I am deluded, and obstructing progress – me, the same guy who served the software gods so faithfully!
Well let me tell you something. I have seen these gods in their underwear, and the sight is not pretty. If you want to serve someone, pick someone else, because these guys will kill you.
“Now, now”, you say, “Calm down, it’s not that bad, it couldn’t be.”
“Is that so,” I say, “Well just take off your blinders and look around - and look at computer voting, in particular. You like the idea of computer voting because you think it is progress, whatever that is. But lets anonymous persons control our voting. Now if that isn’t important, what is? This is the perfect example of bad progress.”

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