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Makes me appreciate that tech-utopianism takes a lot of work. Technology alone seems to have no values.

• lolc 7y ago
  To me, it often seems like technology does have a moral imperative it follows: It chooses transparency in all kinds of situations. That's not to say that technology consciously chooses to impart transparency. In reality it's just too damn expensive to erease traces in data. Which leads to transparency by default.
  • FillardMillmore 7y ago
    I'm not sure if I'm convinced that technology leads to transparency by default. I don't think it would be too expensive to drop a particular record or table from a database if the incentive was there. Of course, when you consider distributed systems in which data for an entity or transaction is spread across many different systems and infrastructures, it would be too expensive to track down and eliminate all traces of the data. But could you elaborate on what you mean by 'transparency by default'?
    • lolc 7y ago
      > I don't think it would be too expensive to drop a particular record or table from a database if the incentive was there. Copying is so cheap these days that it often becomes intractable to erease it all. > But could you elaborate on what you mean by 'transparency by default'? I often observe that we think that some things should be private but that we do not spend the effort to keep them that way.
• tobr 7y ago
  Which brings to mind Kranzberg's first law of technology: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”