I'm Tired of Pretending Tech is Making the World Better
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Tech isn’t the problem. It’s the people in charge of it. It’s the capitalism/neo-feudalism controlling the politics.
Exactly. I would extend that and the article's premise to say, tech isn't innately good or bad, it is just a tool that can be applied in good or bad ways.
For example at his cafe, a QR code ordering system could have been optional for those who prefer it, and could be easily implemented without collecting any personal data. And that could actually be a positive thing for those who want to reorder without getting up or who have social anxiety. But by forcing all customers into this confusing and privacy invading system, the tech becomes a bad thing.The villain of that story is not tech. The villains are the online ordering company that decided to make a data grab, and the cafe owner who decided to buy tech so he wouldn't have to pay servers.
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Author is one step away from the realization that Capitalism is the culprit, and technology is just the vector.
Technology has never been the problem: there's nothing wrong with genetic engineering, AI, etc. The can (and have) been used for good.
The problem has always been the "greed is good" sociopaths using it for evil.
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Science and technology under capitalism is a regressive force for violent control.
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If you use and consequently support scummy Amazon you fully deserve it.
Oh I'm so sorry someone asked for an enamel pin from Amazon. Maybe next time someone asks me for a gift from somewhere I'll subject them to a purity test.
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The problem is the tech is no longer addressing and solving existing problems. It is only being inserted into working systems to collect data and fees, breaking the processes.
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Maybe they did? You're kinda missing the point though, which is that this stuff is becoming more and more common and will be nigh-unavoidable in the future.
It's clear they did not walk out.
By the time I placed my order - paying a 1% fee to the app makers in the process - I would have happily paid double for the experience of simply flipping through a menu and talking to another human being.
(Emphasis mine.) This is from the very next paragraph after what I quoted.
You also clearly missed the point of my comment, which is that unless consumers start refusing to take this bullshit lying down, this stuff will be unavoidable in the future because there will be no other choices left.
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It's clear they did not walk out.
By the time I placed my order - paying a 1% fee to the app makers in the process - I would have happily paid double for the experience of simply flipping through a menu and talking to another human being.
(Emphasis mine.) This is from the very next paragraph after what I quoted.
You also clearly missed the point of my comment, which is that unless consumers start refusing to take this bullshit lying down, this stuff will be unavoidable in the future because there will be no other choices left.
You also clearly missed the point of my comment
I understood your point completely. Yet mine somehow still zipped over your head. This is not a choice any particular individual can make. Other people make that choice for you.
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Oh I'm so sorry someone asked for an enamel pin from Amazon. Maybe next time someone asks me for a gift from somewhere I'll subject them to a purity test.
apology not accepted
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I'd say that's mostly right, but it's less about opportunities, and more about design. To return to the example of the factory: Let's say that there was a communist revolution and the workers now own the factory. The machines still have them facing away from each other. If they want to face each other, they'll have to rebuild the machine. The values of the old system are literally physically present in the machine.
So it's not that you can do different things with a technology based on your values, but that different values produce technology differently. This actually limits future possibilities. Those workers physically cannot face each other on that machine, even if they want to use it that way. The past's values are frozen in that machine.
OK. That makes sense.
It is more expensive (time, money) to reinvent a present technology, so it takes less effort to base further development on the currently available design. -
For recommendations you can't go wrong with Martin Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology. It's a difficult read without previous knowledge of Heidegger's philosophy (or phenomenology), but the essay is so influential that there is plenty of secondary literature on it, from videos to podcasts to texts.
His argument, in essence, is that technology is a way of being that makes everything appear as resources for technology to use. As we become a technological society we see people as "human resources", nature as a depot to be emptied: wind as power, rivers as kinetic energy, the ground as a chest of minerals.
The same phenomenon can also be seen in everything that digital technology does to the persons and society. For example Cambridge Analytica, they are an expression of technology as a way of being, and what they see is untapped resources to be harvested for political gain.
The argument is so influential that Arendt appropriated it to argue that technological/scientific politics will always become self-deluding without actual human intervention. Ellul argued that the technological society becomes self-referential, so that technology creates new issues that we can only solve with technology, which creates new issues (and so on). In the end we become able to do anything... but unable to either stop the cycle or understand what is going on.
Thanks. From your answer I get that there are some philosophical basic knowledge which I'm missing.
If nothing else, now I have heard the name Heidegger in this context.:)
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sure, some tech makes life more difficult, but it'd be weird to require it's use, so you're either going to go through a bad government structure (different problem) or choose to use bad products for some reason.
I guess the secret third answer is working somewhere that requires you to use shitty tech, but like, same problem as no 1.
I find the bigger problem to be implementation and support, shit like QR codes and phone based payment taking over things like paper, and card based payment, that's objectively worse. Though both QR codes and phone based payment are in isolation, explicitly good and beneficial things.
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almost always makes the whole thing substantially worse. I've yet to see a case where it helps.
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