I think the big difference is embodiment. You can get away with "not knowing" how thunder and lightning work because you can _feel_ thier impact, you can _feel_ the storm coming in the air, you can _feel_ the impact and the sonic boom of a nearby lightning strike and you _know_ damn well to find shelter. They didn't know how lightning wo…
I think the big difference is embodiment. You can get away with "not knowing" how thunder and lightning work because you can _feel_ thier impact, you can _feel_ the storm coming in the air, you can _feel_ the impact and the sonic boom of a nearby lightning strike and you _know_ damn well to find shelter. They didn't know how lightning works in scientific terms but they knew plenty well how it works in practical terms and were perfectly capable of governing their lives and actions accordingly in the moment. Where the lightning came from may have been a mystery but what you _do_ when it does was as obvious then as it is now. The black boxes of digital life are not the same at all, not only do they not give the same embodied feedback of real life, they're now almost ubiquitousy designed to give /false/ manipulative feedback to coerce you into acting against your own interests, primarily by sucking you in and trapping your attention when you should rightfully be repelled if you were experiencing the impact directly, like a lightning bolt, rather than through a hall of mirrors.
Obviously there has been precedent in eras past, the printing press, the television and 24 hour news, etc, etc, no one's saying there isn't, but just as obviously the digital age has strengthened, exaggerated, and built new layers on top of the technological and cultural innovations of it's predecessors.
I don't think you can get a felt sense for germ theory though. It's intuitively obvious that diseases propagate somehow, but the fact that the actual mechanism is tiny animals you can't see is extremely unintuitive. Disease being a fact of life, the struggle to avoid it in the face of extremely unclear feedback seems like it would directly parallel the experience attributed to computerization.
I'm confident that there were many problems people have faced throughout history– in eras where they were much more existentially confident than today– which wound have been completely impenetrable to the average person's problem-solving. The movement of ocean currents carrying fish and ships, how and why crops grow better or worse, how vermin propagate; and all the interpersonal enigmas– what causes war, how people fall in love, how to battle addiction, etc– which we still don't understand today. I think that the default state of human problem-solving involves fiddling with black boxes producing unclear outputs, and that the advent of modern rationality has made limited inroads towards alleviating it.
Frankly, the access to information facilitated by computers has probably helped the situation enormously, even if the computers themselves are obtuse. The number of times I Google to understand a problem I'm facing in the course of a week is sufficient to offset any confusion those computers cause in my life. I don't think that life's degree of understandability has much to do with people's distress about it.
I think the big difference is embodiment. You can get away with "not knowing" how thunder and lightning work because you can _feel_ thier impact, you can _feel_ the storm coming in the air, you can _feel_ the impact and the sonic boom of a nearby lightning strike and you _know_ damn well to find shelter. They didn't know how lightning works in scientific terms but they knew plenty well how it works in practical terms and were perfectly capable of governing their lives and actions accordingly in the moment. Where the lightning came from may have been a mystery but what you _do_ when it does was as obvious then as it is now. The black boxes of digital life are not the same at all, not only do they not give the same embodied feedback of real life, they're now almost ubiquitousy designed to give /false/ manipulative feedback to coerce you into acting against your own interests, primarily by sucking you in and trapping your attention when you should rightfully be repelled if you were experiencing the impact directly, like a lightning bolt, rather than through a hall of mirrors.
Obviously there has been precedent in eras past, the printing press, the television and 24 hour news, etc, etc, no one's saying there isn't, but just as obviously the digital age has strengthened, exaggerated, and built new layers on top of the technological and cultural innovations of it's predecessors.
I don't think you can get a felt sense for germ theory though. It's intuitively obvious that diseases propagate somehow, but the fact that the actual mechanism is tiny animals you can't see is extremely unintuitive. Disease being a fact of life, the struggle to avoid it in the face of extremely unclear feedback seems like it would directly parallel the experience attributed to computerization.
I'm confident that there were many problems people have faced throughout history– in eras where they were much more existentially confident than today– which wound have been completely impenetrable to the average person's problem-solving. The movement of ocean currents carrying fish and ships, how and why crops grow better or worse, how vermin propagate; and all the interpersonal enigmas– what causes war, how people fall in love, how to battle addiction, etc– which we still don't understand today. I think that the default state of human problem-solving involves fiddling with black boxes producing unclear outputs, and that the advent of modern rationality has made limited inroads towards alleviating it.
Frankly, the access to information facilitated by computers has probably helped the situation enormously, even if the computers themselves are obtuse. The number of times I Google to understand a problem I'm facing in the course of a week is sufficient to offset any confusion those computers cause in my life. I don't think that life's degree of understandability has much to do with people's distress about it.