Emerging technologies are NEVER cause for celebration. EVER.

Because, no matter what “benefit” you think they will bring. What they truly do is cause destabilization.

There are always unseen costs and unintended side effects. Each new bit of technology takes away as much as it gives.

I'm not against technology. I don't want to live like an Australian Aborigine, despite their having a culture that was stable for over 50,000 years.

But we need a better understanding of technology and how to use it. Instead of it constantly "happening" to us like a train wreck or a life changing illness.

The way we use “technology” currently is deeply flawed.

For example, take plastics. So very useful. So very versatile. So insidiously toxic in multiple ways.

There was zero debate, consideration, or votes about the wide-scale adoption of plastics into every aspect of our lives. We just let it happen to ourselves. Because you are right, it's what we do EVERY FUCKING TIME.

Some guy, working at a chemical company, developments it. Everyone can see the profitable applications. So they “just start making shit and selling it”.

Everybody loves the good shit you can make out of plastics and in just a few decades they are everywhere. Before we even have time to think about the consequences of that action, we have gone so far that turning back becomes almost impossible.

Now we know that plastics don't degrade into the environment. They just break down into smaller and smaller particulate. Right down to the nano-particulate level.

Plastic nano-particulate now covers the world and is in everything. Including you.

In recent years, microplastics have been documented in all parts of human body. Including the lungs.

Detection of microplastics in human lung tissue using μFTIR spectroscopy

In breast milk.

Raman Microspectroscopy Detection and Characterisation of Microplastics in Human Breastmilk

In maternal and fetal placental tissue.

Plasticenta: First evidence of microplastics in human placenta.

In peoples blood.

Discovery and quantification of plastic particle pollution in human blood

Microplastics scientist Heather Leslie, formerly of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and colleagues found microplastics in blood samples from 17 of 22 healthy adult volunteers in the Netherlands. The finding, published last year in Environment International, confirms what many scientists have long suspected: These tiny bits can get absorbed into the human bloodstream.

So, by letting plastics “just happen” we may have poisoned the entire planetary ecosystem.

Other examples are easy to find. How about chemicals?

Globally, more than 350,000 chemical compounds (including mixtures of chemicals) have been registered for production and use. Their manufacture and sale is incredibly profitable for the people who engage in it and we all benefit from it.

At least right now.

There are currently about 100,000 chemicals in use in the US. Of those the EPA has only taken action:

- to reduce the risk of around 3,600 chemicals.

- to ban or limit the production or use of only 5.

It has NOT regulated a single chemical in the United States since the mid-1980s. Not one.

In 2016 the Obama administration managed to force an update to the Toxic Substances Control Act. The new law requires EPA to test tens of thousands of unregulated chemicals currently on the market, and the roughly 2,000 new chemicals that go on the market each each year.

https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whoweare/about/index.html

This was great. But, the Republicans crippled the update and protected the chemical industry. They forced an agreement that industry would pay for studies conducted by the EPA but capping the number of chemicals the EPA can test.

The EPA will be able to assess only 20 chemicals at a time, and each study has a seven-year deadline. Industry may then have five years to comply after a new rule is made.

At that pace the agency will never be to review all of the chemicals in our environment. We will always be in a state of uncertainty about being poisoned by the food we eat, the water we drink, the clothes we wear, the items in our homes, and our environment.

Our entire world is now saturated in chemicals. Even women who live in “pristine” indigenous environments have detectable levels of dioxins and other “forever chemicals” in their breast milk. All of us now carry our personal “chemical lifetime load” that we start acquiring in infancy.

This shit needs to stop.

Male Fertility rates globally are crashing. It might have nothing to do with environmental pollution like this. Or again we may have poisoned ourselves out of short sighted greed and stupidity.

We need to use technology better.