And they weren't necessarily wrong IMHO, with the exception of maybe the original landline telephone (I would give this an asterisk though, and confine it to the first ~20 years of landline telephony; ie, farmers running homebrew line using barbed wire fencing in the depression-era dust bowl to keep current on grain prices, etc.).
Cars are great for transportation and have enabled humankind to travel further and more often then ever before, but they are also 2000+ lb. death traps and combined with alcohol they are an absolute threat to everyone's safety.
Television is pretty much ALL evil these days (everyone's trying to sell you SOMETHING or worse yet manipulate your natural thought process -- but it's all about money of course), so that's out.
Computers are probably a double-edged sword. Incredibly powerful and have given humanity new capabilities, but we've probably become too reliant on them. They are too ingrained into daily society now. On a somewhat narrower scope: social media is absolutely 100% all evil, designed intentionally with the explicit intention of manipulating their own users.
I wouldn't by any stretch call social media "all evil". It has its problems, a lot of them. But, for me personally, it's just an extension of the rest of the internet, where I encounter people and ideas that I wouldn't otherwise stumble into. I grew up in a fairly poor, extremely white setting and social media (and its precursors, IRC and the like) was, no joke, pretty much the first exposure I had to people who were not white Americans. Meeting those people, having to get along with them, was a pretty big formative thing that wouldn't have happened without these tools. Or, in the reverse, watching the GamerGate thing happen clued me in early that the trolls and harassers that now do the alt-right thing had a certain kind of power that needed to (and, it turns out, wasn't) defended against, that they were not just "internet whiners" but were creating their own extremist political factions whether they knew they were (I think they did) or not. And, today, through idly browsing Twitter when I have a little downtime, I often see drift through my timeline the kinds of thought-provoking links and threads that make me aware of valuable and viewpoint-broadening ideas I wouldn't see otherwise.
I wouldn't say a word in defense of television, though. Being at my parents' for Christmas has made me uncomfortably aware of just how loud and penetrating those commercials-every-six-minutes are. And it's very, very one-way.
I too grew up during the dawn of the Internet and "information age" in general. It was a wonderful time to be living, and an even better time to be a teenager -- we had such a leg up on the previous generation because we KNEW the 'net was going to be huge, and most of them thought of it as just another passing fad. I have fond memories of even pre-Internet, dialing into local BBS' on 28.8 baud modems -- which of course led to discovering "phreaking" to get free long-distance calls to dial into the non-local BBS' (hey, I was a teenager remember). Such great memories.
IRC was, and still is, incredible. But I can't bring myself to lump the current day 'social media' (ie; Twitter, Facebook, etc.) into the same category as IRC. Yes technically I guess it's in the same vein, but there are no "likes"/hearts/thumbs-up-or-down on IRC -- it's just a vast open public forum for almost instantaneous text-based chat, for better or worse (better, IMO). That whole likes vs. dislikes thing which is far too central and too much of a core part of current social media platforms. It's way, way, way too easy to use as a tool for manipulation -- and if anyone thinks they are NOT doing this, they are sorely mistaken.
There's a case to be made that advertising is really the central issue with Twitter/FB/etc. They have to keep people's eyes glued to the platform in order to show them more ads in order to make more money. That business model isn't going to end well for anyone except the advertisers.
But I can't bring myself to lump the current day 'social media' (ie; Twitter, Facebook, etc.) into the same category as IRC.
There was no magician behind the curtain of IRC statistically evaluating every line of text before deciding whether or not showing it to you would or would not make you spend more time on IRC, and interjecting an ad every few lines. And you saw it in order too, there was no monkeying with that...
> Cars are great for transportation and have enabled humankind to travel further and more often then ever before, but they are also 2000+ lb. death traps and combined with alcohol they are an absolute threat to everyone's safety.
The time savings provided by cars, once you factor in time spent to pay for them, pump gas, perform (or wait on) maintenance, plus actual travel time, is dubious for anyone earning average income. I've run the numbers, and even for me earning way over, it's practically a wash versus a bicycle.
Then consider its effects also on distances between things and how many people are now dependent on cars (=less free), and it's not hard to see widespread ownership of automobiles as overall a very negative force in society.
The time savings provided by cars, once you factor in time spent to pay for them, pump gas, perform (or wait on) maintenance, plus actual travel time, is dubious
I call shenanigans on this. How much time do you spend pumping gas? I doubt I spend more than 5 minutes a week, maybe even every two weeks.
As for travel time, just other day I was thinking, my 30-minute journey would be a day's walk probably, starting and finishing in darkness. And carrying all my stuff on my back I would have been exhausted at the end, if I'd gone cross-country instead of on metalled roads, instead of arriving in no time feeling fresh as a daisy. If the weather was bad perhaps I couldn't have made the journey at all, on foot.
And as for maintenance, well, I have a Toyota, so that doesn't take much of my time either!
Cost of gas. Cost of maintenance. Cost of insurance. Cost of replacement car from time to time. Cost of parking, both at home (garage is part of the cost of your house, if you own/mortgage) and at work. Direct time lost to gas pumping, maintenance, replacing a tire, detours taken to reach gas or maintenance places, whatever. Time of actual commute. Find typical values for normal working people for these, find typical commute distances and times, find average hourly wage. Figure out how much of an average person's working day is spent paying for car-related expenses, how much non-driving time goes toward one's car averaged per day, and add those to actual commute time. Compare with time to travel average commute distance by bicycle.
That's without considering the effects of omnipresent automobiles on city layouts and how they force everything to spread out (enormous parking lots much larger than the destination they're for, incredibly wide roads, massive "green spaces" to provide buffers between ugly, noisy, smelly, dangerous highways and areas for humans, big front yards for similar reasons, and so on)
[EDIT] to save you some time, the average spent on car-related stuff in the US per year is about $9,000. Average hourly wage, 26.55 or so. Call it 50 working weeks a year, 5 days a week. Looking at about 1.35 hrs per day paying for car crap, on average. Plus actual commute time and other time lost to cars for various reasons. And I doubt they included cost of garage on house or whatever in those numbers.
[EDIT] to save you some time, the average spent on car-related stuff in the US per year is about $9,000. Average hourly wage, 26.55 or so. Call it 50 working weeks a year, 5 days a week. Looking at about 1.35 hrs per day paying for car crap
That "car crap" is also the ability to head into the mountains or to the coast or the lake at the weekend... while cyclists, so smug during the week, are left begging for a lift. Like children being taken to after-school activities.
Compare with time to travel average commute distance by bicycle.
But that's not a fair comparison, because bicycle commuters have completely externalized the cost of the infrastructure they rely on. You have to compare commuting by car against commuting by bike with no roads. That's why I compared it to travelling on foot across country in my comment.
