I saw a post recently that was arguing that you should stop using alcohol wipes when giving yourself hrt injections because it's too wasteful, literally saying that the possibility of sepsis is worth not using a square inch of cotton per week.

They weren't arguing for more efficient solutions, ways of recycling the material, or anything like that. It was just "you should facetank risk of infection in order to not create waste"

And goddamn isn't that everything I've been noticing lately about how people talk about technology and progress and waste these days; a kind of reactionary tech-pessimism.

I recently had a student argue that we should never have invested in NASA or the space program because rocketry can also be used for weapons, damn all the other things that came out of it like weather satellites.

Westerners literally make up stories about the Fukushima Daiichi plant, talking about people who are walking-dead cleaning up the site since they'd already had a lethal level of radiation exposure. Sorry, what's that? No one died from radiation exposure when Fukushima Daiichi failed? That doesn't feel right.

The power grid! My god, the power grid. Everyone is so hung up on "what if we ban datacenters" but, guys, the US power grid has been decaying from austerity and intentional conservative sabotage for decades. Remember when rotted infrastructure caused wildfires a few years ago in California? The primer driver of your power bills is that, not facilities still under construction. We have to fight and build solar and improve transmission between states so we can actually send that electricity places!

Like we can't embrace our own "reject modernity". We just can't. The answer can't be "stop using air conditioning", "stop using electricity", "stop using satellites", "stop using alcohol wipes".