StopTech

Thanks, I didn't realize

Cloudflare sucks and I wish nobody used it

That sounds like a good place to start. Take it one step at a time. You can even start with just an offline morning a week. You said you like reading books so that's one thing you can do in those times. I'm sure you have other hobbies or tasks you can do that don't require digital devices.

Unfortunately most intentional communities don't last very long and many are cult-like, overly collectivist or based on (what I would consider) wacky ideologies. There's a few that have lasted and seem reasonable but I haven't looked into them much yet and doubt I would be able to visit them. My ideal has some overlap with back-to-the-land movements but it goes further in that it strives to ultimately get away from the internet, cars, drugs and other modern tech. I'm not aware of any intentional communities specifically trying to do that.

Seems like a decent example of a question that people fall either side of yet isn't too politically charged

I'm not sure why you say I didn't respond (my response to the above comment is here) but appreciate your comment.

I don't think my argument rests on the existence of corporations. Even if corporations were abolished I think technology would still progress (even if more slowly) and make us extinct (or nearly extinct) unless there were strong barriers against certain technologies enforced by laws or by convention. As long as there is an incentive to make things more efficient/safe/convenient (whether that's money, cattle, power or something else) and no reason a purely short-term-thinking self-interested person should stop then I think it's inevitable that you end up with human extinction. I don't see how we can possibly remove those natural incentives to make life easier, so the only alternative is to counteract those incentives with penalties, either through laws or social conventions.

Unfortunately I haven't yet seen a non-corrupt government (none of them establish the consent of the governed by having a route by which individuals can secede and form a separate state or even a process by which the government can be thrown off through a majority vote of the public), and with clandestine agencies that routinely do illegal things I don't have much hope in laws being followed. That is, unless the majority of people truly believe in the importance of those laws. That's why I suggest our best hope is to get the public on the same page about the dangers of technology and based on that we can be protected from extinction either by strong social convention or laws that are strictly enforced.

That's a shame, I thought this was a refreshing exchange of views. I hope you'll both stick around for the rest of c/StopTech.

Yes, they allow books. But unfortunately you wouldn't be able to join them unless you hold their specific religious convictions.

My hope is that intentional communities can form that support each other so that they are not subject to strong competitive pressures that practically necessitate anti-consumer practices and the use of modern technology that does more harm than good. The central principles would be belief that doing things the natural way is (almost always) best and that societal wellbeing is largely unrelated to efficiency, economics and material goods once the basic needs have been met. No other religion or beliefs would be required. Through their positive example these communities would influence the rest of the world in the right direction too so that we might not become extinct.

To this end I started https://lemmy.today/c/StopTech and https://lemmy.today/c/ParallelSocieties. I'm working on groups on other platforms as well and trying to start a community in the real world.

Yes I think you're right

I definitely think the Amish way of life is happier, healthier and more beneficial to others than American life for the past 100 years. But the way they managed that is by rejecting modern technology with very little picking and choosing like using radios but not phones or cars but not planes. I'm sure when they do pick and choose (e.g., I heard some use pesticides like Roundup) it will usually have negative consequences (see Roundup).

But unfortunately the Amish will die along with everyone else if there isn't a global stop to technological progress. Forming anti-tech communities is an important step in the right direction but awareness of the issues needs to spread to most people on the planet - and fast.

Whether or not a search engine uses AI doesn't necessarily say anything about its privacy. DDG already processes your queries and passing the query through an AI doesn't affect your privacy as long as the AI model is not affected in any way and the query isn't kept for future AI purposes. But you're right there's generally a negative correlation between AI and privacy and also a positive correlation between people who care about privacy and people who don't like AI, so there's probably a correlation between DDG users and anti-AI people. However I think you meant to say "selection bias".

AI got a lot better in recent years because of transformers and the multi-head attention mechanism. Some more major breakthroughs will be made with a bit more time that will greatly boost accuracy and efficiency. Technology progresses exponentially so advances will get more and more common. One example of how LLMs are currently getting more efficient is DeepSeek's improvement of sparse attention. There are trillions of dollars being thrown at these problems and they're racing as fast as they can because there's an arms race as well as heavy market competition.