The slow, painful death of technological privacy - brought not by war, not by scarcity, but by convenience of another app that saves you 3 clicks per transaction paired with the forced usage of certain functions within an existing environment
Comment on The Copilot Delusion
plumbercraic@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
The thing I hate the most about the printing press and its ease of access: the slow, painful death of the scribe’s soul—brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By type. By machines. […]
There was once magic here. There was once madness.
Monks would stay up all night in candlelit scriptoriums with bloodshot eyes, trying to render illuminated manuscripts without smudging their life’s work. They cared. They would mix pigments from crushed beetles just to see if they’d hold. They knew the smell of burnt parchment and the exact angle of quill where their hand would cramp after six hours. These were artists. They wrote letters like master craftsmen—full of devotion, precision, and divine chaos.
Now? We’re building a world where that devotion gets mechanized at the door. Some poor bastard—born to be great—is going to get told to “review this Gutenberg broadsheet” for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The scriptorium will become a print shop. The quill a lever.
XeroxCool@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Stupid comparison, tbh. Scribing is just boring and repetitive work, programming is cognitive work.
plumbercraic@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
That’s wildly incorrect and somehow serves to underscore the original point.
Scribes were not glorified photocopiers; they had to reconcile poorly written and translated sources, do a lot of research on imperfect and incomplete information, try to figure out if the notes in the margin should be included in future transcriptions, etc. Their work required real subject matter expertise, training and technique, was painstaking and excruciating, and many hand written manuscripts are absolutely works of art.
floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Then I apologise about my ignorance on the matter, but you’re now making the same point as the author - were you mocking or sharing their perspective?
There’s a lot that goes behind “work” that you don’t see in the final output. It’s important to care about that art, and a shallow copy is just not the same as “the real thing”. Right?
plumbercraic@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
Both, I think? Respecting the craft and expertise of the way we used to do things is important, but the author is being melodramatic and I wanted to poke some fun.
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 3 weeks ago
That’s something people have wondered since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Is a mechanically mass produced widget the real thing? People even make fun of the biological locally grown artisanal produced food and the recycled hand made furniture. Shein is quite popular with their fast fashion. Except the rich will have tailor made clothes of course.
AdamBomb@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
There are definitely parts of programming that are boring and repetitive. I’ve been using AI to speed that up. I still do the creative parts 100% myself.
Zexks@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You are wildly out of touch with both history and reality if you think this was stupid
quocirca.com/…/the-gutenberg-revolution-how-the-p….