Gonna be hard to reach “the cloud” if the grid is down for 5 days and there’s no one competent enough to get it up again, or if the green energy grid is down from actual cloud cover.

But I think those running the show want to keep a technological society running for control purposes (global centralized electronic currency and all pervasive panopticon, with “social credit” ratings) while plunging people into a state of desperation in order to foist it on them. Either they’re biding their time or haven’t figured out how to do it without risking the whole technological control edifice crumbling.

The context is that Rabbi Shimon saw his teacher, Rabbi Akiva, publicly tortured to death by Romans, and all sorts of mass murder of Jews (to the Romans, this was just normal counterinsurgency, of course, and really par for the course in the ancient world.)

Think about how pissed off you are at the state destroying your family and life without killing or torturing anyone, and then project that to what Rabbi Shimon and the Jews of his generation had lived through. “But the marketplaces and bridges and bathhouses!” “But the high speed internet and cheap toilet paper!” At some point, who cares? Roman technological advancement served to support lots of cruelty and dysfunction over a long period of time, just like modern technological advancement.

Not within a democratic framework.

True. However, all this science, technology and advancement has another effect: no society in existence until the 20th century could have sustained a level of dysfunction and degeneracy similar to what surrounds you without collapsing.

>like the monty python what did the romans ever do for us sketch

You should take a look at the full context of the sketch-they lifted it straight from the Talmud:

Rabbi Yehuda and Rabbi Yosei and Rabbi Shimon were sitting, and Yehuda, son of converts,sat beside them. Rabbi Yehuda opened and said: How pleasant are the actions of this nation, the Romans, as they established marketplaces, established bridges, and established bathhouses. Rabbi Yosei was silent. Rabbi Shimon ben Yoḥai responded and said: Everything that they established, they established only for their own purposes. They established marketplaces, to place prostitutes in them; bathhouses, to pamper themselves; and bridges, to collect taxes from all who pass over them. Yehuda, son of converts, went and related their statements to his household, and those statements continued to spread until they were heard by the monarchy. They ruled and said: Yehuda, who elevated the Roman regime, shall be elevated and appointed as head of the Sages, the head of the speakers in every place. Yosei, who remained silent, shall be exiled from his home in Judea as punishment, and sent to the city of Tzippori in the Galilee. And Shimon, who denounced the government, shall be killed.