Hesiod already feared technology’s power to corrupt human restraint and values

Evidence

According to Hesiod, iron hardened not only our ploughs but also our souls. Under its influence, our spirit was hammered and forged in fire, our brand-new desires quenched like the hissing metal in the smith’s cauldron. Virtues were tested and values destroyed just as our bounty burgeoned and our estates expanded. Strength begat new joys but weariness and injustices too. Zeus would have no choice, Hesiod foretold, but to one day destroy a humanity incapable of restraining its own, technologically induced, power. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 51

Categorization

• XREF: The ancient ambivalence toward technology prefigures the modern critique of platform power; resonates with the reader’s Frankfurt School material on instrumental reason and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. — connects to: New technology hardens souls and destroys values even as it increases bounty.; Technology’s liberating instrumentalization of things becomes a fetter enslaving man. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 589; Technologically educated masses paradoxically exhibit readiness to accept despotism (+1 more)
• SEED: Angle: tracing ‘the tech pessimism lineage’ from Hesiod through Marx’s ambivalence to today’s AI critics as one continuous argument, not a modern invention.

Broader Connections

• New technology hardens souls and destroys values even as it increases bounty. #expands (0.90)
• Technology’s liberating instrumentalization of things becomes a fetter enslaving man. #expands (0.85) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 589
• Technologically educated masses paradoxically exhibit readiness to accept despotism #expands (0.80)
• Technology can increase human weakness even as it increases power #expands (0.80) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 822