Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, April 13, 2012

Technician, Heel Thyself

Writes TPM's David Kurtz:
Before James Cameron saccharined it all up with a love story, the story of the sinking of the Titanic was an object lesson in the hubris born from man’s love affair with technology… I couldn’t help but wonder if that lesson has stuck in any real way.
Given TPM's endless advertorial pseudo-reportage about the awesomeness of the various Kindles and iPhones they want the lemmings to consume at the moment, or TPM's breathlessly uncritical hyperventilations about the artificial intelligence of palpably unintelligent software, or TPM's handwaving about the superabundance promised in deceptive corporate press releases hawking 3D printers and sooper solar panels and wearable computers, or TPM's falling for faster-than-light nonsense or extrasolar planet porn, or TPM's celebration of the so-called greatness of celebrity tech CEOs who actually do little more than repackage stale crap and skim the ideas of anonymous thinkers and outsource manufacturing to poisonous slave camps and beg for government handouts and contracts and bailouts when they aren't jerking off for the camera about what Randian hyper-individualist free market capitalists they are, or TPM's flogging of the inevitably emancipating force of digital networks more likely to surveil and control us, harass us with incessant target marketing, and evacuate our deliberation of anything more substantial than reports of the present contents of our stomachs and the cuteness of babies and kittens, given all this, I do indeed think that Kurtz would do well to remember object lessons in the hubris born of people's love affair with what passes from moment to moment for high technology and technology's fantastic futures.

For more posts castigating facile futurism and techno-utopianism at TPM you might look here and here and here and here.

2 comments:

jollyspaniard said...

You would have thought by now that the whole blogs, facebook and twitter are going to make despots obsolte meme would have withered in light of a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

jimf said...

> You would have thought by now that the whole 'blogs,
> facebook and twitter are going to make despots obsolete'
> meme would have withered in light of a mountain of evidence
> to the contrary.

And fiction too, by now.
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-09-17-n72.html

The noose is tightening:
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/crime/hacker-higinio-ochoa-caught-fbi-sexy-pictures-his-girlfriend
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/04/uae-signs-deal-integrate-national-ids-mobile-phones