Silicon Valley wants us to merge our daily lives & activities "ever more seamlessly with informatic machines” https://t.co/hfkBvgnvf7
— Frank Pasquale (@FrankPasquale) December 20, 2016
1 It's important to recognize the extent to which tech "Thought Leaders" accept a host of essentially faith-based narratives @FrankPasquale
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) December 20, 2016
2 …through which they frame qualified developments & confused aspirations. @FrankPasquale
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) December 20, 2016
4 Computationism, cybernetic-totalism, digi-utopianism, anti-material/body, individualist cyborg-ruggedization, eugenicisms… @FrankPasquale
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) December 20, 2016
5 One can criticize the paradoxes and uncertainties in these assumptions, aspirations and frames (after all, there are many) @FrankPasquale
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) December 20, 2016
6 …and one can criticize the results/goals justified, inspired, and rationalized by them (also many), @FrankPasquale
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) December 20, 2016
7 …but critics should take care not to deploy futurological frames in assessing this scene and proposing our alternatives. @FrankPasquale
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) December 20, 2016
8 It matters that the universe is not a simulation, there is no AI, humans are not merging with machines, tech is not accelerating, etc.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) December 20, 2016
@dalecarrico yes..our Marinetti's "War is beautiful because it initiates dreamed-of metalization of the human body" https://t.co/AvvEDVITek
— Frank Pasquale (@FrankPasquale) December 21, 2016
Tech talkers, like most evangelical con artists, do love their Destiny tall tales: they sell widgets and papers, but they don't tell truths.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) December 20, 2016
5 comments:
Frank Pasquale is my thought leader!
At the risk of being earnest in reply to snark, I will assume that you mean this more or less straightforwardly. He's enormously smart, I'm teaching him this summer at Berkeley. He's also a more patient and gracious person than I am so I marvel at him somewhat. Do you know Audrey Watters, Tom Slee and David Golumbia? Together with Pasquale, they form a sort of posse of thinkers on "Tech" who are leading somewhere for me.
Frank is a student of yours? Holy cows, maybe I am just two degrees of separation of greatness.
Sorry about the snark. I'm very pro-Pasquale and very anti-thought leader. Both those sentiments are revealed in a blog post I wrote some time ago. Re-visiting that post, and the Pasquale article it links to, reminded me why Frank Pasquale is thought leader material, even though thought leaders are not a good idea. It's because in that article, Frank frames the smart city issue squarely in terms of information asymmetry, rather than the usual bogeycritters of privacy, accountability, even transparency. I've adopted as part of my own personal message discipline the editorial policy of avoiding talking about transparency-without-adjectives, in favor of "reciprocal transparency" or "bilateral transparency," as contrasted with what I call "mirror shades transparency." Mirror shades are the fashion accesory associated more with cops than every other group, but other metaphors (and literal examples) of one-way transparency include the reflective (from the outside) windows that are the universal architectural idiom of corporate office buildings worldwide, and of course the one-way mirror at the Primate Research Lab. Pasquale's description of what they've done to Rio is basically a description of a 1,221 km² panopticon.
Concerning your posse of thinkers, bravo! I must confess I have never heard of Audrey Watters; will look up promptly. I know of Tom Slee as someone who heavily screen scraped AirBnB's website and posted the tabulated data on Github. This is exactly the kind of work for which hacking was invented. David Golumbia is a name that rings a bell, mainly by virtue of being heavily retweeted by numerous people I follow on Twitter (including yourself, of course). Took a look at Golumbia's Twitter page. I was a bit troubled by this. I know it's de rigeur these days to hate hacker culture, the rise of amateurs, and even open source advocacy, but I still can't bring myself to see verbiage like "free speech abolutist industry" without thinking "someone is getting some of their talking points from Copyright Alliance." I'll try to give Golumbia the benefit of the doubt and assume this tweet is out of concern for sex offender victims rather than victims of file sharing or something. I'm well aware that EFF has sold out to Google among others, but at least some of the time I'm rooting for Google over Disney. One thing that is very clear to me is that standing even a tiny chance against the engines of information asymmetry will require a massive amount of amateur hacking (I don't believe for a minute there is (or even can be) such a thing as a paying job doing non-evil things in the information space) and a massive rejection of proprietary software, in general.
Your posse of thinkers on "tech" should definitely include Cathy O'Neill.
Oh, wow, this.
Frank is a student of yours?
To be clear, when I say I'm going to teach an important author, you can be sure I mean "I will teach work by that important author to students of mine." Pasquale is someone I interact with online occasionally -- those interactions and others I have observed inspired the comments about his graciousness and patience.
I do think of him as a kindred spirit -- and hope he thinks the same of me -- as, as it happens, I also rather tend to think of you, so there!
Post a Comment