The power of "tech" discourses to incumbent interests arises from the way they disavow history while appearing to assert substance. 1
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
The work of "tech" discourses of prosthetic or therapeutic "enhancement," for example, is to disavow the interdependence of human agency. 2
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
The one to be "enhanced" is always already the isolated neglected precarized individual "self," 3
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
their "enhancement" (setting aside the hyperbole & deceptions typical in such presentations) valorizes and naturalizes this isolated self, 4
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
then offers compensatory fantasies of "capacity" that never redeem violations compelled by the sociopathic model of selfhood they fortify. 5
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
The real work of "tech" discourses of AI is to disavow the incarnation of intelligence and responsibility in living bodies and history. 6
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
The investment of human-made machines with intelligence and agency, 7
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
-- as when we treat "autonomous" weapons as killers, or algorithms as bureaucrats -- 8
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
divests humans of intelligence and agency, denigrates intelligence and responsibility in their human forms: 9
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
the better to rationalize the mistreatment of humans as if they were robots, 10
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
the better to disavow responsibility for murderous uses of artifacts or rationalize callous decisions by bureaucrats. 11
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
As Evgeny Morozov mentioned in a tweet yesterday (an observation that set me off on this twitter-essaylet), 12
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
the real work of "tech" discourses of Smart this'n-that is to disavow the artificial imposition by elites of austerian scarcity: 13
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
What makes a smart device "smart" is its promise to make due with less, 14
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
erm, make do
and quite apart from the fact that "Smart" gizmos rarely live up to the hype with which they are marketed, 15
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
-- indeed, what gets peddled as "smart" tends to end up looking stupid before it gets tossed into the landfill to poison the world -- 16
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
what one is not paying attention to when one is celebrating coping with less is the question just why are we compelled to cope with less? 17
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
Why are we coping with less? Is the leanness necessary? Is it shared? Are some benefiting disproportionately from the leanness of others? 18
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
It is one thing to grasp sustainable civilization must stop fantasies of limitless growth and harmless waste with shared problem-solving, 19
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
but quite a lot of the "tech" that gets called Smart seems instead to facilitate the erosion of social support and collective humanity. 20
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
"Smartness" figures unintelligent artifacts as intelligent: the literal denigration of humans follows upon their figurative denigration. 21
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
The real work of "tech" discourses of Design and Technocratic policy is to disavow their hostility to and demolition of democracy. 22
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
Designers amount to small cohorts of privileged individuals claiming to solve political problems by circumventing political processes: 23
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
So digirati promise to code democracy from privileged enclaves, green design promises sustainability without threatening consumerism, 24
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
designers fail to accomplish their avowed universal ends while succeeding in self-promotion and parochial profitability for incumbents. 25
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
In a related development, Paul Krugman has taken to describing so-called neoliberal technocrats as "faithocrats": 26
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
Espousing faith in serially failed austerity and trickle-down, they peddle their plutocratic politics as neutral apolitical engineering. 27
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
Of course, no "tech" has a single politics, but the disavowal of politics through the conjuration of "tech" is indeed a "tech" politics. 28
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
It is never true that all artifacts and techniques are discerned as "tech": 29
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
We describe only some of the field of the artifactual as "tech" while naturalizing the rest of that field as the natural, the customary. 30
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
There is an inevitable de-politicization of that which is naturalized, 31
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
and that naturalization always conduces to the status-quo and its beneficiaries. 32
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
Further, when "tech" fixates on power as capacitation then promises to solve/circumvent political problems with instrumental rationality, 33
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
such "tech" discourses always disfigure freedom and progress as political categories as also disable democratic processes. 34
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
as they also disable, grr!
The disavowal of history at the heart of prevailing "tech" discourses is reactionary, reductionist and anti-democratizing in its thrust. 35
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
Only by pluralizing, narrativizing, politicizing "tech" can we engage critically in real progressive technoscientific social struggle. fin.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) July 20, 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment