Show threadbsmall2Dec 23
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> .. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelus_Novus
#WalterBenjamin with #PaulKlee (and Hannah Arendt...) on
#ProgressIsALie gets me thinking of #ProgressWithoutPeople , David Noble, Malm, Tokar
Angelus Novus - Wikipedia

bs2Feb 27, 2025
> What is driving this headlong rush to implement new technology with so little regard for deliberation of the pedagogical and economic costs and at the risk of student and faculty alienation and opposition? A short answer might be the fear of getting left behind, the incessant pressures of β€œprogress”. But there is more to it....
https://monthlyreview.org/product/digital_diploma_mills/
http://helmut.knaust.info/resource/noble/DDM.pdf
#DavidNoble #DigitalDiplomaMills #ProgressIsALie
Monthly Review | Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education

Is the Internet the springboard which will take universities into a new age, or a threat to their existence? Will dotcom degrees create new opportunities for those previously excluded…

Monthly Review
Show threadbs2Mar 4, 2024
> The transition from water to steam in the British cotton industry did not occur because water was scarce, more expensive or less technologically potent – to the contrary, steam gained supremacy in spite of water being abundant, cheaper and at least as powerful, even and efficient....
#SteamPower #ProgressIsALie #TechnologicalDeterminism #Techinicism
bs2Mar 1, 2024
Reading #AndreasMalm's _ #FossilCapital _ convinces me again that #ProgressIsALie. An article by #BrianTokar sent me to Malm's books and they seem very helpful so far. They complement #AmitavGhosh's doubts about the "#Anthropocene" term:
> .. if some humans introduced steam power against the explicit resistance of other humans, then it would be hard to maintain a notion of it as the expression of a species-wide project... steam arose as a form of power exercised by some people against others..
bs2Nov 4, 2023

> Progress β€” change for the better over historical time. The word has many uses (social progress, technological progress), but the reason it raises red flags for historians is the legacy of Whig history, a school of historical thought whose influence still percolates through many of our models of history. Wikipedia has an excellent opening definition of #WhigHistory...

https://www.exurbe.com/on-progress-and-historical-change/
#ProgressIsALie

On Progress and Historical Change – Ex Urbe

Show threadbs2Nov 2, 2023

> none of the favored explanations holds up... decisive in the end was the quest for managerial control.. managers at GE wanted a technological design and mode of implementation that favored their own power over that of unionized workers. .. the CNC design with all that.. and rejected the material design and social relations of record playback...

#DavidFNoble #Technology #BranchOfMoralPhilosophy #Progress #ProgressIsAlie

bs2Jan 8, 2022

> ... [the] idea β€œthat the permanent tendency of progress in the production and distribution of wealth is in the direction of more and more complicated and costly processes, requiring greater and greater concentration of capital and labor.”

- https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/01/06/rethinking-progress-in-a-time-of-crisis/

#DavidDamato #BenjaminTucker #progress #ProgressIsALie #USA

Rethinking Progress in a Time of Crisis

Proponents of capitalism like to call theirs a free market system. There is a benefit to refusing to grant them this, refusing to allow corporations and their servants in the state and the press to cloak themselves in the language of freedom and rugged individualism, as if capitalism isn’t a human-designed system of violence and theft. What will ultimately prove persuasive to those who have swallowed the dogmas of unlimited growth is they have misunderstood their cherished principle of free markets; they have used that principle, unobjectionable when properly understood, to defend a system that could hardly be more different from a legitimate free market.

CounterPunch.org