“Unlike a century ago, today for everyone who is working on technological progress, there is someone else who thinks that they are saving the planet by stopping them. Has the pace of technological change slowed? It certainly has for technologies that have to run the gauntlet all the way into consumers’ hands and make an obvious difference, because those are the easiest kinds to attack. It has also slowed in areas where scare stories are easy to generate, like nuclear power. In a world of delusional, self-important Eloi, it is much more advantageous to be a screaming coward than to be brave and productive.”

This has happened in waves. The Eloi of today are spurred by groups having continuity to ones like the “Deep Ecology Foundation” and other anti-tech pro-precautionary principle people. These provide the rationale for the Eloi. This has happened with other groups before, starting no later than 1850, IMHO, and each of them have had academic apologists. The aristocratic reaction against the increasing political freedoms of action during the 19th century is the first definite example, with groups from the US Slave State plantation owners to Napoleon III and Bismark’s Junker Aristocracy providing a more effective European opposition, culminating in WWI. They hated non-elite political networks.

The racist reaction against freedoms of association likewise had academic backers, and did not peak till the 1940s, when our own most racist party led the US into a war against a fully totalitarian racism. The socialist reaction against market freedoms of action followed, and ran a strong challenge for 45 years. We are now seeing the ebbing wave of the scriptural literalist reaction within Islam against intellectual freedoms of action, even as the Deep Eeks build their power by “viewing with alarm” any technological advance not managed to death by the precautionary principle.

Each of these waves of reaction have distorted the growth of industrial society. Each of these has targeted one or more levels of freedom of action needed to make industrial networks productive. The Deep Ecology-guided Eloi are simply the fifth wave of them. They seem to see any Singularity, no matter how defined, with horror, specifically because they cannot predict now how they will have to act after a certain time to maintain their status. Each wave of reaction has been driven by a desire to freeze some aspect of the world in place. So far, they have failed. But as the rates of change do indeed accelerate, their opposition will become ever more frantic.

I’m glad the places and countries supporting the needed advances are growing. That way it will be harder for any one political hierarchy to halt the progress. We will see how much distortion happens in the currently peaking wave.

Regards,

Tom Billings

[All too true -- but in Wells, of course, these people turned into the Morlocks. In my theory, physical evolution has nothing to do with it; there's been no time for that. And the shift that did happen wasn't anything foreseen by Wells. --jsh]