“For the sake of life, the development of the last hundred years has been almost incomprehensible. “Nowadays, an ordinary worker lives in many ways a more abundant life than royals a few generations earlier,” says Vahvanen.
Pekka Vahvanen wrote a book “Kone kaikkivaltias – kuinka digitalisaatio tuhoaa kaiken meille arvokkaan”, about how digitalization is going to destroy everything that is valuable for us. The world would be a better place if no one ever invented computers. With the industrial revolution, our life began to determine the trader’s logic. Everything is determined by price and everything is valued from the point of view of trading and profit making.
I would like to ask, how many people have received cultural content, that has moved you in a very deep way because of Internet? The content you are always thinking about again and again, and you think how on earth I could live without this. We have achieved what was only dreamed of in the 20th century.
It is often though that social media puts us under pressure and social media is just a bad thing. However, I have a strong belief that we may not even have understood how much our daily life has changed since technology has made our lives easier. Many jobs disappear because you no longer have to have to have a lot of people to get your own opinion or point across. In theory we should be completely free of censorship. We should be free to say how we feel at the moment and somebody will eventually reach that information.
Censored liberation also means that the individual should bear the responsibility for what he or she shares and also for what he or she receives. At the moment, we live in a world where responsibility is seen as a bad thing. Responsibility means doing what you don’t want. Tove Jansson knew it long ago. I don’t want to receive the things that I’m receiving at the moment. I don’t want to have pain in my life because of knowing that climate catastrophe is going to change our lives and I don’t want to know how many people were killed today. Who is responsible for that?
It would be nice for someone else to take responsibility for your actions. The school is raising our children, McDonalds feeding them, etc. This is a disease that develops in a welfare state. Responsibility can always be rolled somewhere else and someone takes care of it. Or is there someone? It’s easy to blame other people and things that are wrong in your life and look for guilt outside. The easiest way is to fall into bitterness and say that all evil comes from outside and I myself didn’t have the chance to choose to be born in such an era instead of taking responsibility for making the present better. After all, no one else, aside from ourselves, can solve the problems that we are facing at this precise moment.
I believe the Internet is the best invention in the history of our humanity. We want to be better and we want to change the world. We refuse to just swallow shit without chewing it and we are ready to do our best to make everything change for the better. I don’t even want to start with how many online people have made me feel better and have given me hope for the future.
I had a conversation with my friends and I told them my concern about working life and its changes. The feedback was incredibly warm: do what you want, because I know what’s good for you is good for me. We are in dire need of each other in times when we think that communality ruins the ability to advance in a career. When you are happy, you are probably making many people around you happy. Even though this may sound very cliché. Depression affects not only the individual who suffers from it but also everyone who interacts with this person.
In 2019 we will need each other even more, so take care of the people and things around you. And use the Internet in an ethical way, it’s for connecting people, not to tear them apart.
– Eeva