Dune is not anti-tech… | technology under capitalism 

you have been conditioned by YT to accept your own slavery, so use an @d blocker hehehe

Me too😂

Nord VPN you mean 😭

Same

@@charmedprince maybe he did not want to do an upaid plug?

the issue surely isnt replacing the workers, but what happens afterwards, are workers replaced so they are liberated from the need to labor, from scarcity, so they become free to live however they please, or are they replaced so more profit can be extracted from the machines that replace them, to endlessly enrich a select few who open the machines

I do think we should replace workers with machines when machines become more productive, but we should take care of the workers then. By giving them new jobs, paying for courses, so they can get new qualifications, and so on.

It's interesting as well because it shows that stopping the production of thinking machines only entrenched the power of the elite. Now the peoples of the universe don't have access to the tech needed to destroy the great houses, and it seems like internal rebellion has been made impossible.

Dune condemns this point either, for a neo-feudal system is politicaly fragile and anti-scientific.

Dune is the First Cold War, Paul is JFK, Vlad is a mix of Hitler and Stalin. It's very much a colonial fantasy in the tradition of Rudyard Kipling, with a libertarian spin. Liberal imperialism is bad but it's still better than socialism. We're all better off in neolithic circumstances being "close to the earth" and so forth, but brown people can't help themselves and they need a white guy to step in and show them how it's done. The movies take some great steps to complicate this narrative, but once you look at Herbert's comments in interviews and read about his life it's impossible not to see how reactionary his fiction is. I say this as someone who has read all six books and seen the new movies in theaters twice each.

@@rsavage-r2v still after writing all that using 2 words to describe it is.....just lame. That all I'm saying. Sure it can bee seen that way but that's simplifying the story A LOT. that's all I'm trying to say, and I was Happy to see a video not talking about Dune from that one over used point of view. Do. You. See. My. Point? If not, I shan't be responding again. It was a simple point and you responded with an essay🤣🤦‍♀️🤷‍♀️

@@TrippyKitty08 That doesn't change the fact that it is a white savior narrative. But the point of art is that it's subjective, and Cappelle's reading is good and thoughtful and interesting and I share many of her sentiments.

@@rsavage-r2v Nope. Guess you read all six books and didn't get the message. "Liberal imperialism is bad but it's still better than socialism. We're all better off in neolithic circumstances being "close to the earth" and so forth, but brown people can't help themselves and they need a white guy to step in and show them how it's done." You forget that the manipulation of the Fremen began way, way, way long before the events of the books and the films. So no, they didn't need a white guy to step in, they were already indoctrinated by white colonials FOR the white guy to step in. And the white people in the Dune series weren't framed as saviors, they're framed as tyrants, manipulators, eugenicists and mass murderers. So yes, "the white savior" reading, is the shallowest of readings.

​@@rsavage-r2v yeah though personally I read it more as white man's burden trying to be a Greek tragedy/ cautionary tale but well trapped by the assumptions of whiteness and colonialism ( the story operates under the framework that genocide is a necessary evil or at the least the characters think they are trapped in doing the terrible to prevent greater harm)which is a flavor of the same troupe or close enough. Love the books but seeing a bunch of articles saying the movie wasn't anti-colonial as the books is wild. The text are very much unquestioning or uninterested in the legitimacy of empire (though it does point out the inevitable flaws in empire as a way of organizing people) It's interested in leadership but both individually or on the grand human scale (while leaning into logic of eugenics or at least fantasy equivalent). Plumb the books for critiques but the new crop of surface critiques are puzzling.

I thought futurists tended to be nerds turned on by modernity, minimalist chrome aesthetic, and new, abstract ideas of high tech.

@@caiden3396For sure. But sometimes, high tech also means self sustainable, environmentally friendly structures, that would mean shifting our energy production away from our primitive current state, that happens to make trillions of dollars for certain corporations

It's a marketing tactic, and though futurists don't have nefarious intentions, the elite is more than happy to encourage a utopian view to meet their goals.

@ville__ You forgot Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein

​@@jayzee4097How does that supposedly work..?

Yeah I’ve honestly been sold on the idea of neo-Luddism. Sure technology can be great for progress, but certain technologies in our current system only serve to make things a lot worse. We need to change the social relations in our society so that technology can work for the people and the environment instead of destroying them

@@code8825 Yeah, take the internet for example. It's made people more socially distant, damages social development and is a huge contributor to mass radicalization. I imagine if you did the brass tax you'd find out that overall it contributes more harm to society than good.

@@code8825 I don't agree with either the luddites nor the neo-luddites, of course technology should work for ppl and for the environment, and the simplistic discarding of the luddites as nonsensical is also problematic. Where this is wrong is that technology is always the manipulation and experimentation with and of nature, but what needs to happen is the understand and reconciliation of experimentation at differing levels of scarcity and scale. So take the Dune example of the Fremen, there society developed technology in the advent of water scarcity, but the societies dream is to have a lush plant where they no longer need to live in these harsh conditions. Thus, in the end the Fremen develop to a scale where they have the means to terraform the planet and turn it into a lush paradise reconciling their austere technological beginnings with large scale developmentalism of the empire. This actually ends up being the antithesis to an ideology such as luddism or neo-luddism, because they refuse to break the machines and rather continuously reinvent themselves in the face of new challenges. Now, when it comes to the books commitment to luddism within the framework of information technology, the Dune universe shows how this becomes a problem, information is horded by a radical religious sect (the Bene Gesserit) who function the same way as the prior system run by robots, thus the solution is not better than the initial problem, in fact it maybe worse.

So like the pre modern Union workers association 🤔🤔🤔u mean???

​@@AG-vh3lxmost of them would have had no problems with powerlooms if it they did not loose income. Instead the income went to the factory owners.

Yeah but thats not a good thing. The butlerian jihad isnt framed as correct, it was a crime that wiped out an entire people. Its like when people take for granted that the bene gesserit are correct in their ideas and methods and its just like... no, you do realize theyre bad right? Like if a story has a crusade to wipe out all non believers in a faith, you dont read that story and say "that story was pro murdering everyone who wont convert". That bit from the orange catholic bible is framed as wrong, despite being tacitly believed in and approved of by the populace.

@ville__ that seems like bullshit

And in book 4, Leto explains that he kept it in place and even expanded it after his own jihad because it made people easier to control

If you actually read what happens at the very end of the whole Dune saga, Duncan Idaho becomes the leader of the human race as a ghoul and combines himself with the AI robot called Erasmus and then Duncan leads the human race to a new era where humans and computers respect eachother and neither one wants to enslave the other. Erasmus was one of the robots that they fought during the butlerian jihad but erasmus ultimately just wanted to understand humans and at the end they thought that they now knew everything there is to know and wanted to give their knowledge to duncan who has the ultimate human in their eyes

@@karigrandii Ibelieve that was Brian Herbert's addition to the Saga. It wasn't written by Frank Herbert to my knowledge.

Its just when I read comments like yours that I realize I'm not alone in this world (in regard to worldview)!

I think that a lot of the "functions" and "power" of our current domestic technology can easily be scaled back in a non capitalist world. For instance, computers are full of bloatware and unnessecary propriety apps to collect data and try to get you to buy adjacent services. likewise, the software made for computers is poorly optimised and again seeks to collect data and advertise to you. Another good example is the growing gaming industry, where games are purposely made to run poorly to push people to buy new hardware and then new hardware is made to get people to buy new games. In a non capitalist society, a lot of software would be made redundant as the social poverty it seeks to fill is alleviated - e.g dating apps and meditation apps, e-books, a lot of TV shows. Also, data servers, advertisements, AI, all of these things that are designed to exploit you will be gone. From a non-computer standpoint, think of fridges. A sustainable future is going to be a future with much reduced animal agriculture (which will be a difficult transition but seems to be one speeding towards us), and so fridges will be able to be less powerful to begin with. furthermore as new sustainable methods of architecture and design are adopted, we will likely see a shift back to icehouse style larders to store food. Or think of cars, how they are full of plastics and computers and are utterly overdesigned - micromobility solutions area already growing and small sustinable personal transport for short distances does not need half as much "comfort" as a car has. I think that our current technology is not making us comfortable but rather a desperate attempt to fix the discomfort from living in a society designed to make you uncomfortable to sell things to you. After capitalism, technology will be less important and will simplify greatly.

​@@inspirednamehere6166This technology is being incubated in the Capitalist system. It could either entrench global capitalism into some kind of techno-feudalism or it could destroy capitalism from within as widespread, cheap AI will fundamentally alter markets. The stakes are quite high.

What fresh hell is _solarpunk?_

​@@DreamFearlessthe channel @Andrewism has a great primer on that

you're taking a word from a nazi ?

The thing that strikes me about “solarpunk” (indeed, all eco futurist scenarios) is that these utopias require a very small population, or at least, sparse population densities. The more I look into this hippie dippie stuff, the more I get a Malthusian “Thanos was right” vibe or a certain Austrian mustache man ranting about “living space”.

@@archer1949 the aesthetic reflects its best examples in those small communities, but it is not the only way to be Solarpunk. It would be a mistake to conflate "eco futurist scenarios" and "very small population" with Thanos or the Austrian fellow. There are examples and discussion about big city being solarpunk too, if designed well, if urbanism focuses around nature, the people and their relationship. It might be true that a hyper dense city / megalopolis might be more difficult to design for a solarpunk society, but big cities can be solarpunk if they don't destroy nature and biodiversity, and allow human to thrive. But anyways, not the place for this discussion.

Recycle* Lol sorry

I agree and disagree. We are a part of nature and we are animals, but we're also sentient and extremely intelligent. Our intelligence and self-awareness can mean we are separate from technollogy. After all, we're already doing things to our genes and bodies that our evolution didn't intend for us. I feel like that's the end state of any sentient species in the universe - they abandon their natural evolution once they attain advanced scientific knowledge.

​​@@stephengrant4841evolution intends nothing! Try to look beyond genetics when you're thinking about nature, thought is part of nature. Thought is a way for evolution to occur beyond the speed of birth and death, with thought a creature can adapt to it's environment mid-generation. Humans mastered that niche, and pushed the boundaries by creating language and technology to speed up adaptation even more, so even our abstract concepts like philosophy are still part of nature. We are not as self controlled as we think we are: just as our genes determine our bodies, our thoughts too are products of our environment and are passed onto us, determining our potential. It is not possible for us to abandon our evolution, we can only shift it's medium. We are no longer adapting to the jungle ecosystem, but to the social ecosystem.

Small correction: its either sixties or '60s 😁

​​@@TheHungryRomanianuhm ackshuallay 🤓☝️

Source? Where did Frank said this?

@@ragingtomato04 One of his interviews. And it's : ' can you give me the source please. Not' :Source ? ' .

@@spiritualanarchist8162What specific interview are you talking about? Coz I listened recently to Frank's interviews and I don't remember him saying any of that. And also "Uhm Ackchyually ☝️🤓 you should have said this longer way of saying the same thing instead of a straightforward one word question" 😂

It's called Dark Ages because surprisingly little is known about that time period versus its neighboring historical ages. It has nothing to do with lack of tech, or knowledge and more to do with historians finding less information.

@@josephreynolds2401 Usually the term "dark ages" was used by the enlightenment, but the original term of dark ages were used for the fall of Bronze Civilization, when even writing was lost in some cases. Medieval Ages gave Germanic people literature and allowed them to prosper.. it was a golden age for them.

@@josepheridu3322 Medieval "Dark Age", as I understand it is just a lack of interest/popularity by the writers of that time to write down current events. Thanks for highlighting the misunderstanding. It's a bit of a misnomer to call Medieval period a "Dark age", what you said makes a lot of sense.

​@josephreynolds2401 Wasn't there also a mini ice age during the Middle Ages as well?

​@@jamesmunn576 Nope, the middle ice age was in the 19th century. In medieval times there actually was a super warm time, at least in parts of the world like Europe. That lead to increased agriculture and trade.

Open Source Software :)

Naive view of world

Spot on! Open Source software is the way to go against planned obsolescence and technology being oriented for the profit of the few. I always chose it when possible.

Every piece of tech is invented because people think others may want it enough to pay for it. Every bit of profit is gathered from people who willingly gave their money in exchange for it, making the entire world better and more productive.

That massively oversimplified. Profit for the few isn't (with the usual exceptions) the purpose of the tech, but a side-effect of complex development requiring a lot of resources that have to be invested beforehand, without any guarantee of return. Open source software also isn't an argument against this, as only part of it is really purely community driven (which has its own issues, as we saw in the recent incident with xz), while the development of an ever growing part is financed by companies with the goal to make profit - for example by offering services around said software. On the other side there is a lot of really good software that is neither open source, not made by huge companies, but by smaller teams who put a lot of effort and dedication into creating great products, because that's what allows them to pay their bills.

Yeah the first Dune book implies this. Unfortunately, when Brian Herbert took over, he just made it evil AI which is less interesting and even back then was an overused trope.

The cutting-edge tech is in the metallurgy more than the spear, no?

Now, apply this thinking on the recent "moratory" on AI development...

I always say that the indigenous were *more advanced* than contemporary society. Advancement is not how many redundant electronic components you can jam pack into a device to conduct a simple task; advancement is how much control you have over the task being done, how simply it can be done, and how sustainable it is. Contemporary social organization is vastly less advanced than indigenous communal structures, and this is demonstrated clearly across multiple statistics (suicide rate, divorce rate, excess mortality, shootings, etc) which indicate deep social decay. Indigenous food production was also far more advanced than contemporary settler colonial agriculture, which, on its current trajectory, is about to lead to unprecedented global famine. The grasp many (of course not all - turtle island is not a monolith) indigenous peoples had on horticulture, ecosystem dynamics and food production including agiculture, agroforestry, species (ie. diversity of flora and fauna) consumed were FAR more advance than the handful of unsustainability + unjustly derived, pesticide/herbicide ridden, infertility and cancer inducing, nutritionally deficient foods we consume today. As a person from the global south practicing Ramadan on this night of power, I extend my solidarity to you, and pray for a decolonized Turtle Island, and for the world to be emancipated once and for all, from the clutches of imperialism

​​@@af8828i disagree here, and your definition of advancements seems quite tailored to say the least. Take trains for example created by a british mining engineer. They were a significant advancement and allowed for mass transportation and thus much better logisitcs but they were not sustainable and to the originial comment nor were they a weapon of war. Unless you want to say it was because it helped with logistics which is true, but so is a horse drawn carrige, and on this point european advancement wasnt all tailored for war, penecilin was an advancements so was blood transfusion, neither of these are explicitly tools of war. Acaully alot of medical technologies that save thousands every day was forged in the fires of war, you should really look into medical advancements made in ww1 and ww2 and how they also helped the mass production of medicine like penecillin which was obviously undertaken by america. Getting back to trains, during colonisation, this advancement of trains was used every where to help logisitcs and transportation. This was a tool that freatly helped the imperialist powers during colonisation. They arent sustainable (they were a main driving force in the mass killing of buffaloes in america) , they arent exactly simple machines. Furthermore, settler food production was simply miss guided taking the systems of agriculture from a foreign land then amplying that to that enviroment isnt efficient but what did they know they were settlers they did it what they knew to do. This isnt them being less advanced per se. Furthermore, the beginning of this when tou talk about jamming redundant electronics into a device i would agree with tou because thats not how you advance "contemporarily" as you put it. Simply just use the thought process of captilist no need for engineers here. With more redundant electronics in my device im going to be paying for more exspensive parts that arent needed, that the customer doesnt need. That means more money spent of exstrcation refinemant transport, i could widen my net profit by dimply getting rid of it. Thus it simoly doesnt make any economic sense to have redunant electronics in a device. Unless you make up the profit elsewhere like a smartphone do we need all these features, not really. But profit is made selling an image, that smoothness. This itslef acatully drives advancements just see how advanced but small our tech is how fast we can communicate, its driven by that need. Thus instead of that exception that redundant electronics line doesnt really make that much sense. Furthermore when you say imperialist powers are you old or new age, i know you mean france, uk and america and the other european powers who had empires. But do you also mean Turkey and there exspansions recently? And russai and china with whats its doing in the south china sea?

The phrases "holy war" and "fundamentalists" are plainly stated multiple times throughout the film. Unless one is living under a rock, no remotely sane person with adequate media literacy came out of the theatre cheering Paul on at the end. So what is this "whitewashing" accusation?

How is indigenous technology going to solve modern problems like climate change and epidemics?

@@af8828everything you just said is false.

You are almost there...

How do you think AI companies got all of their training data? It wasn't through acts of benevolence.

It's really dystopian that people earnestly believe that humanity being too good at making things is a threat because it will cause jobs to disappear. Having too much food and shelter with less work is not a problem. An irrational system of property and production is the problem.

@@rsavage-r2vBut we wont get a fair system in the current one, and the asset class is trying their hardest to keep it that way.

​@@jayzee4097I honestly don't really see it wrong for a company to take data from me to offer a superior service or product, ideally I would be compensated for this according to the economic value of my output but in return I'm provided a free service so I suppose one could argue that is compensation. I 100% agree that people should have more rights over their data and to determine what is extracted and how it is used however.

@@jayzee4097 I completely agree with you. That's why I think we, the overwhelming majority, need to get together and make it so an asset class no longer exists. A fair system is impossible as long as the asset class controls society and the state.

Perhaps the reactionary knows they are maladaptive to the changing world. Technology fundamentally changes environments and thus new Darwinian selection criteria occur which selects for people with different traits. The stupid but strong man was very well adapted to the preindustrial past but now offers nothing a machine cannot do better. The intelligent but weak man of the past was useless because thoughts can’t pull a plow but now is the top of society due to finance and technology. The luddites of the past were made poor and brought down as factory workers took their place.

Ideologues are the same, left and right. This video and its comments section is a good example of people viewing dune, capitalism, technology, ecology etc through a leftist lens and therefor getting everything wrong.

@@Alex.Holland So your argument is everything left-wing is automatically wrong because you say so?

@@lloroshastar6347 no, I am making the same argument you are, "Not saying Conservatives can't understand Dune, many do, I'm talking more about the kind of media figures like Ben Shapiro, Tim Pool, the Quartering and on TV stations such as GB News who effectively misunderstand almost all forms of media and literature" The same is true of leftists. being so ideologically captured that you can only view things through 1 lens makes you wrong very often.

Hardly

@@royalecrafts6252 it's true. This phenomenon is known as 'cultural lag'.

@@SGC90-t5y tech is not advancing

@@royalecrafts6252 ?

@@royalecrafts6252 It absolutely is. Look at the mass growth of conspiracy theorists. It's caused completely by the internet. It allows us to post whatever we want, and people by and large, overall, are stupid. Our inability to research and think critically causes too many of us to believe baseless conspiracies. We weren't ready for mass internet misinformation.

That's a servile insurrection narrative disguised as a horror. I.e., it's using A.I. as a stand-in for fears of people of color revolting and taking over the white man's world.

did you watch the video? i use dune as a metaphor

​@@AliceCappelle Or you have a mental disease where everything is Capitalism or Patriarchy. Frank Herbert was not anti tech in anyways. His focus was on the permanence of the human condition despite extreme advances of tech like the feudal structure of the galaxy even 1000s of years later, religious fundamentalism, wicked statecraft, over whelming influence of oligarchs and above all the tenacity of the human spirit in contrast to A.I. Herbert was actually quite a bit of romantic despite his nihilistic statements & was constantly warning the world to not buy into the Messiah trope and maintain one's sovereignty which is definitely lacking in ur socialist utopia 😂 Your use of Dune is in fact deceiving like OP's comment and ur false parallels to justify ur superficial critique of the world is laughable. At least do some research bfore posting such blabber 😮‍💨

@@masterroshi690 Exactly. She doesn't actually like anything except the sound of her own irritating voice.

Considering that some slave owners in the early U.S. had children with their slaves, knowingly forcing and introducing conscious minds into a life of enslavement is probably not something new to us

That is the problem: Capitalism DO NOT WANT AI TO BE DEVELOPED.

Yeah I very much don't think that Dune is anything of a... an ideal. Designed much more for interestingness than instruction.

@@TheNoodleGod9001 yea that's why i find it fascinating. though in some cases i think the framing of the interestingness has some very dubious reasoning. the central idea of "HARD MEN FROM HARD PLACES" is one of them. not to mention Leto II's discourses on gay people...

He's a nobleman, a mentat, and a bene gesserit wickerman. The first ubermensch. That multiple omnicides follow is the deepest insight Herbert had. Maybe his only good one.

​@@caffetiel as usual, NO ONE HERE UNDERSTAND THE BOOKS!

The funniest part of the series is the "ship names"...