>Hi there, John Stuart Mill.

I've been called a modern day Spinoza, hadn't been called out as Mill yet though. At least I'm in good company.

>It's that some technology (which may be in our near future, but isn't quite here yet at least) may be so dangerous and so ubiquitous that unless you can reduce the number of crazy or misguided people (terrorists, violent nihilists, bored teenagers, or whoever) to zero, civilization will end.

Yes. I know. That is consistent with my interpretation. What I said spoke not to the message of the paper, but what it means in the backdrop of current events. I also strongly disagree with the conclusion that civilization ends because some crazy gets his hand on a thing. I say civilization ends once people start panicking about some crazy getting a thing, and seriously considering we have to either full stop technological development, or cleanse the world of "problematic sub-populations" for the sake of something that might not even happen.

>Lamenting the death of classical liberal values is not an argument.

Correct. It isn't. Nor was I attempting to do so. My argument was that seeing as civilization is already lost if we're considering hitting the full stop button, drugging the masses, or going off into flights of fancy creating a world with zero space for essential liberty; the only way to go is up. We have to reaffirm our commitment to personal liberty, rebuild the civic framework of trust, and embark on rational, prudent ways of hardening society against whatever new "threats " there are to be dealt with due to mischief caused by members of the very civilization we so deem to protect.

Civilization predicated on essentially null liberty, and iron-fisted systemic control isn't civilization. It's barbarism. Civilization is what you have when everyone has the means to put one over on everyone else, but we all decide to build/do something productive instead of trying to cause others harm.

Do some people make the harmful choice? Yes. Those people generally set the level the rest of us respond on. Creating a self-correcting dynamic.

>If such technology is feasible, there are only two options: accept the end of civilization and perhaps humans, or try to prevent use of the technology through mass surveillance and elimination of privacy. Or drugging everyone, or some combination. e.g. 1984 or BNW. The counterargument is that those schemes fundamentally don't work, but that really depends on the nature and reliability of the surveillance or the drug, doesn't it? Even if they don't work, the choice is between trying something that probably won't work, and the certainty of the end of human civilization if nothing is tried.

And this is the type of thing that indicates to me, that for at least right now, civilization is dead or dying. See, humanity doesn't go away when civilization does. Our works and infrastructure, and everything else don't just disappear. We just start acting in the most base, animalistic ways conceivable.

Dystopian literature is not a thrice damned instruction manual. It is a cautionary tale. A warning, a description of a societal failure state.

To take any option as laid out in these tales and to consider it a valid, agreeable, or desirable way to advance is to reject the central tenet of civilization. That people, given the means and freedom to employ them will generally do positive things, and for the one's that don't, we have ways of dealing with that; but in the interest of not succumbing to our baser natures as human beings, we bind the employment of those means through systematized, impartial codes, so at the very least, we protect ourselves from unraveling the civic trust that makes our current state of being possible.

It is through the respect of personal liberty, and prudence in the application of violence or coersion that the state of civility bears fruit.

I'll happily accept the possible risk of sudden existential collapse. If it's going to be, then it'll be. Everything historically recorded, everything being actively researched, and everything existing as even a kernel of a nightmare in a creative's eye is bound by time, space, and the laws of physics. Time we will have, and make no mistake; nothing creates unity in a civilization like sudden existential crisis. Some might even argue, that is how our civilizations mature. By being tested repeatedly, and managing to survive intact.

In case you thought the following were just platitudes, I recommend you think about what they really mean before being swayed by this alarmist/surrendering rhetoric.

Land of the Free, home the Brave.

Those that would sacrifice essential Liberty for Safety, deserve and will find neither Liberty, nor Safety.

The cost of Liberty is eternal vigilance.

I'll gladly wear Mill's mantle, because someone clearly needs to.