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New Technology Is Evil
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In television, chiefly in shows aimed at kids, anyone getting a piece of shiny new consumer technology will do one of three things: Become obsessed with it, to the exclusion of everything else; Become dependent on it (and helpless when it breaks), or Become insufferable about it, until someone else gets an even cooler model. What makes this often laughable is that between the lag times in producing TV episodes (especially animated children's edutainment shows) and the lag time in writers discovering new trends and technology, the "cool new toy" is often quaintly dated. Compare New Media Are Evil. When this technology is used by an entire society, it becomes Ludd Was Right. When this trope motivates the bad guy, they're an Evil Luddite. See also Social Media Is Bad. If the technology has a screen on it and it's compared to the allegedly-superior books, see Books vs. Screens. Compare and contrast Digital Horror. |
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| New Technology Is Evil / int_160d762a | type |
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The Taikan forgemaster from Exterminatus Now believes all technology is evil (including indoor plumbing), except for the beam swords he creates. When the Mobian Inquisition shows up, they get to hear the forgemaster complaining about how all of the new tech is going to destroy their way of life. He's later proven partially right about this. The new recruit who set up the tech is working for a Dark God called the Machine, and the recruit manages to overwhelm the tech on-site, including Lothar's bionic limbs. | |
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As does Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. | |
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Possibly the most literal example of this trope is in Thomas & Friends. Steam engines are usually portrayed as good hearted and helpful, whereas diesel engines (new in the 1950s) are painted as cruel, arrogant, and determined to see all steam engines scrapped. However, some diesels have been depicted in a kinder light and some steam engines are not entirely nice. | |
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In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, the quotes attached to many later tech advances and secret projects consist of Sister Miriam Godwinson railing against the new technology in question. And one of the earliest techs has her talking about how it's not technology that is dangerous, but the men who use it. |
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In an episode of Curious George George and his friend The Doorman go camping, making extensive use of The Doorman's fancy new GPS device. When it (inevitably) breaks, The Doorman is helpless to find their way home again. | |
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To hear Calvin's dad in Calvin and Hobbes talk, you would think any form of technology was the devil's magic. He refuses to buy a VCR, having already gotten fed up with TV and radio, and when Calvin asks him about the internet in one strip late in the comic's run, Dad responds that "it's bad enough we have a telephone!" He's presumably also the in-universe reason Calvin never had a video game system (the out-of-universe reason, of course, being Bill Watterson's dislike of video games). | |
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Elementary: One episode has a killer print a gun and bullets using a 3D printer and then dispose of the gun in a way that makes it look like milk. If the guy hadn't been lactose intolerant and his wife hadn't been a vegan and Sherlock hadn't noticed "milk" in his fridge the guy probably would've gotten away with it. | |
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Captains Crash: One of the Wonderbolts judging the contest, High Winds, is quietly aghast when she sees Launchpad's Jenny in operation, noting that if he can scale this technology up to carry cargo, he could put pegasus couriers out of business, something she has particular feelings about since most of her family are in that business. She's openly relieved when Launchpad crashes, which the other Wonderbolts call her out on. | |
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Stargate SG-1: Early in the series, the Air Force creates an alien/human hybrid craft (basically by bolting human weapons and control interfaces onto an alien fighter), which promptly hijacks itself and nearly kills the pilots by virtue of simply flying into space, out of range of every other craft they have. However, the moral isn't "New Technology Is Evil" so much as it is "Playing with a Black Box is a bad idea." Many later plots in the series involve alien tech that the humans have successfully dismantled and reverse-engineered. | |
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"ZZZZZZZZ", from Indio Solari's El Perfume de la Tempestad, talks about the consequences of letting machines dictate how human beings should live, channeling Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four in the process. | |
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Archie Comics has this as a standard plot where the characters get some new trendy tech and everything goes wrong with it with the characters' usual shticks until they ultimately reject it. If the tech in question stays around in real life for at least a decade, then it just becomes part of the background in the stories without comment. An example is the answering machine in the 1980s, which was the focus of a Veronica story which ends with her throwing it out and vowing to take all future calls personally, while now, that device is just a standard appliance all the characters have. | |
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Sliders: In "Gillian of the Spirits", the protagonists are stuck on a world where the detonation of the atomic bomb scared everyone away from new technology, which is stuck in the 1950s. There is no television, digital hand watches, etc. And the Bureau of Anti-Technology was founded to keep any new technology from being accessed and to arrest those who either make it or possess it. Things are made worse by the fact that the dimensional timer is broken, and there are only basic hardware tools to fix it. | |
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Many of Tales From Dev Null's stories can certainly make new technology seem evil, but in reality, evil is in people all along. | |
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There for those who think that hand-scanning technology is the "mark of the beast" from the Book of Revelation. Actually, since it's explicitly said in the book that one purpose of the mark is to control commerce, this has happened anytime a major purchasing control is introduced, from credit cards to smartphones, at one point it was thought the barcodes on products was a trial run for the mark. | |
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Victoria has this as a central premise. Something went seriously wrong in American society between the 30s and 60s, and television probably had a lot to do with it, and cars that could easily make long trips to neighboring towns. So after country starts unraveling the heroes forsake advanced technology, except military hardware, medicine and computers to let them hack the enemy. Though it's also kind of inconsistent since they create cold fusion and Tesla-style wireless power transfer. | |
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Muppet Babies (1984) has the episode "The Great Muppet Cartoon Show". Scooter makes animation on his computer while Animal uses paint and keeps chanting "Messy!". Scooter gets trapped in a jail made of tron lines until he agrees with Animal. It's a broken aesop, since being messy was supposed to imply creativity, but Muppet Babies was a Clip Show (several movies clips, mostly Star Wars were used heavily throughout the series). | |
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The Monkees: "Monkees vs. Machine" is all about a Jerkass toy company executive who is in favor of firing all unnecessary humans and let computers design and run most everything. Mike is seen as having a genius level IQ for confusing the computer that interviews potential employees. | |
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The short, "Bear Necessities" from the Tiny Toon Adventures episode, "Fairy Tales For the 90's" depicts the Looney Tunes incarnation of The Three Bears in a then-modern-day retelling of the Goldilocks story. While Pa likes the idea of modern houses and technology, Junior certainly thinks modern technology is evil and misses his old life living as a wild bear in the forest. It isn't hard to see why, since Junior tries to make friends with a computer, who in return, demands lunch money and fires floppy disks at him. | |
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Some sects of the Adeptus Mechanicus Warhammer 40,000 believe this, but it's not universal. It's due to their belief that everything has already been made (which it is for many things) so it's better to just look for it, rather than waste time remaking it. Of course doesn't stop a tech priest from claiming they found something they've made. Standard Template Construct. QED. It's more of a belief that xenos technology is evil, because a) it was made by filthy xenos creatures and b) it hasn't got the blessing of the Omnissiah. The true irony of the latter is that it's a subversion of the first since the "Omnissiah" is actually a powerful alien, C'tan, whom the Emperor beat into submission to act as inspiration for the Adeptus Mechanicus. At least according to Horus Heresy. |
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Santa Claus: The Movie claims that mass production is the wrong way to make toys. As does Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. |
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In Transcendence, the head of the group cites the first brain uploading experiment which involved a monkey on why brain uploading is evil. "It just screamed." A monkey freaked out upon finding itself in a situation it could not possibly comprehend, so brain uploading is therefore evil because a monkey didn't like it. | |
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Warhammer: Dwarfs are expert craftsmen and some of the most technologically advanced of all the races in the world, but they are also staunchly traditionalist. Any significant leap of innovation is automatically suspect and any new designs will need decades or even centuries of careful planning before even a prototype is developed, and then centuries more of tinkering and testing before the technology is sufficiently proven for others to adopt it. Note that stubbornness being one of their defining traits, there are old dwarfs complaining about people using this newfangled gunpowder when there's perfectly fine crossbows around (and presumably there were dwarves complaining when those came into fashion). Because their psyche prevents them from producing "umgak" (shoddy work), the shame and dishonour they feel if an unproven design causes the maiming or death of their fellow Dwarfs leads many adventurous young engineers to take the Oath of the Slayer. One forward-thinking engineer actually deliberately puts a flaw into his machine-gun design so as to give the senior engineers something to complain about, letting him work out the real problems in peace. |
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Wakka from Final Fantasy X hates all the machina and Al Bhed technology as well, but it should be noted that it's far from new technology. Most of it is, in fact, very, very old. Turns out that the church is actually VERY obsessed with precursor technology because it, combined with a non-aggression pact with a giant battleship programmed to seek out and destroy potential threats to its master's existence, make them the de-facto rulers of Spira, and not Spira's saviours. They lose their shit when the protagonists decide this is shallow-minded greed and blow up their peace treaty. The sequel also plays with this trope, as the Big Bad went insane because of his involvement with stopping a Giant Mecha that gives the middle finger to friendly fire warnings, and ended up obsessed with firing the damn thing because there is literally nothing else in his life worth living for. |
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7th Heaven: This show took place during the end nineties/early '00s, right at the time the internet became booming and mobile phones became a serious thing. The family resisted for a long time to own or participate in any of this new technology. Eric was still using his infamous pager at a time most people had mobile phones. (Granted, the fact that the family were financially tight was also a factor). Eric did have a laptop from season 1 on, but it was implied that it was only strictly for ministry business use, and that it never had an internet connection. | |
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South Park: Played for Laughs in a number of episodes: "Trapper Keeper" has Cartman bragging about his new Trapper Keeper to everyone around him, and it ends up taking over the world and has to be stopped via Time Travel. In "Towelie", the kids become obsessed with their new Okama Gamesphere to the point of destroying an Ancient Conspiracy just to recover it when it gets stolen. In "Best Friends Forever", Kenny plays his PSP to death and ends up using his game to command the Legions of Heaven. In "Smug Alert", the whole town gets hybrid cars and the resulting smug-storm nearly destroys the west coast of the US. At the end, Kyle attempts to subvert this trope by pointing out that hybrid cars themselves are a good thing - that people simply need to learn to be environmentally conscious without developing a Holier Than Thou attitude. None of the people of South Park believe that they could handle that. "Go God Go" features Cartman freezing himself because he can't wait until the Nintendo Wii is launched. Even when he is thawed out in the far future and caught up in a brutal war, he is still motivated exclusively by his desire for a Wii. |
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Many of the Baramin (the bad guys) of Genius: The Transgression believe this. They're each defined by how and when they believe humanity's scientific and technological development took a wrong turn. Some of their beliefs aren't too crazy, for instance the Atomists are upset about the death of the space age dreams, but the Oracles are still complaining about Aristotle's Organon and want to bring back the good old ways espoused by Plato. | |
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The cutting edge appliances in the movie The Brave Little Toaster aren't very nice, to say the least (they were in fact a big Take That! to the 80s consumer culture). Interestingly, the original book averted the trope - the new appliances weren't portrayed as any worse than the older models, and actually helped Toaster and the other old appliances. | |
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