11 ms·

Doug Rushkoff is ready to renounce the digital revolution

139 points by fortran77 4y ago

mitchbob 4y ago
Archived: https://archive.ph/2023.05.11-115448/https://www.wired.com/story/doug-rushkoff-survival-of-the-richest/ https://archive.ph/2023.05.11-115448/https://www.wired.com/s...
hemmert 4y ago
It's so good to see this movement gaining momentum.
- Animats 4y ago
  Not really. It's too diffuse. The closest thing we have to a counterculture is the MAGA movement, and their leader is a billionaire. No mob is marching up to 3000 Sand Hill Road yelling "String them up!"
  - iamdamian 4y ago
    Don't most movements start as diffuse changes in sentiment?
    - cjbgkagh 4y ago
      I think many appear that way but only due to successful astroturfing.
      - iamdamian 4y ago
        According to The Affluent Society [0], a seminal book that established the idea of "conventional wisdom", most movements start with diffuse sentiment changes and then crystallize into a "changing of the guard" only after time has allowed a group to recognize that the general attitude has shifted. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Affluent_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Affluent_Society
        cjbgkagh 4y ago
        The only reason I care what economist think is so that I can best avoid the havok they wreak.
  - confoundcofound 4y ago
    The MAGA movement has a strong anti-VC-and-BigTech bent. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do take action.
    - vkou 4y ago
      They also have a strong fascist and cult of personality and authoritarian bent, expecting them to be your saviours is a juice that isn't worth the squeeze.
      - confoundcofound 4y ago
        [flagged]
      - moomoo11 4y ago
        lol. Everyone in politics wants to be someone’s savior.
    - r00fus 4y ago
      The MAGA movement has been coopted, and all the seemingly grassroots activity is being astroturfed by influencers who are being paid by big money. Cooption is not unique to that movement. Others (some on the left) have been coopted as well.
      - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
        The MAGA movement isn't coopted, it's a wholly artificial creation. Some of it is driven by grift (gold coins, prepper supplies, assault weapons...) Some by political opportunism. Some by nihilistic accelerationism. Absolutely none of it is a genuinely organic spontaneous bottom-up movement. That turns out to be one of the worst things about the Internet. It just doesn't amplify culture. Bad actors with significant resources can use it to steer culture. Any billionaire can seed a political movement now, and significantly influence elections. That's a ridiculous amount of power and it has absolutely no democratic oversight. To an extent that's always been true of media ownership. But where early 20th c. print was very much print-and-hope, with the Internet you can get almost instant real-time feedback of how an influence campaign is doing. And if it's not working you can adjust it to order. At some point soon this whole process will fully automated, with AI running bot farms, creating content, supervising and steering forums, and collecting and personalising prospect details, all without human participation.
  - worik 4y ago
    >....The closest thing we have to a counterculture is the MAGA movement That is tragic, if true. It is not true, here, thousands of miles, and across an ocean, away (-45.75, 170.57) Counter-cultures pumping here
- AndrewKemendo 4y ago
  Yes, though I wish we had a better town square to organize around
- southernplaces7 4y ago
  Technology isn't entirely bad, many aspects of our modern digitized word are indeed good and the vast majority of the world at least tacitly agrees with their existence (Doug Rushkoff certainly doesn't stop himself from fully using the "digital revolution" to promote himself. But, one can believe that and also viciously reject swathes of the dehumanizing people-are-data-KPIs-and-eyeballs-to-be-monetized surveillance world of algorithmic controls, non-human interfaces and other grotesque idiocies perpetuated by modern tech megacorps and their mini techcorp lead followers. Not to even speak of governments taking on the same attitudes. This second aspect of the digital revolution is certainly grotesque and very dangerous.
prepend 4y ago
> Some weeks after my visit, Silicon Valley Bank failed and nearly dragged the global financial system down along with it—a direct result of the Trump administration’s deregulation agenda. Really? This seems kind of far afield. How is SVB due to Trump?
- photon12 4y ago
  There used to be stricter capital requirements and oversight for regional banks, until: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-signs-law-rolling-back-post-financial-crisis-banking-rules/2018/05/24/077e3aa8-5f6c-11e8-a4a4-c070ef53f315_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-signs-... See also: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/silicon-valley-bank-collapse-puts-new-spotlight-2018-bank-deregulation-rcna74655 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/silicon-valley-ban...
- 0x445442 4y ago
  TDS manifests itself in many ways. Blaming the failure of SVB on Trump is just one of them.
Apocryphon 4y ago
Hasn’t this been Jaron Lanier’s shtick for years, too? And all he gets is WIRED articles as well.
- fortran77 4y ago
  Read the article.
- lukifer 4y ago
  They’re both thoughtful and nuanced in analyzing the promise and peril of the relationship between technology and civil society, as well as economic perverse incentives. Strong recommend for “Who Owns The Future?”, every bit as relevant 10 years after publication.
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]
CyberDildonics 4y ago
This is basically an ad (like everything in wired) for his latest book talking about the worst aspects of the latest technology. It says tech billionaires are bad and drops all the usual names even though there is no new information. I'm almost impressed with the amount wired can stretch out vapid nonsense into an article. There is a photo of the guy sitting in a bathtub with a laptop for some reason and a photo of him in his office with a radial zoom filter for some reason. It's basically an article about a guy's book that is written about other news articles.
- 23B1 4y ago
  I mean, WIRED has been shilling for this crap since the beginning – it's only fitting that they capitalize on the backlash :\
Syonyk 4y ago
No real surprise. A good number of people who have grown up with the promise of the tech are pretty well disgusted by what it's turned out to deliver, which is mostly "A handful of multibillionaires treating the rest of us as sets of eyeballs to be monetized at all possible costs." I'm certainly there. I grew up with the promises of the internet, and I have to agree with Doctorow about "Enshitification." Most of the promised stuff has turned out to have some pretty nasty side effects and consequences. Turns out, humans don't scale to a global conversation very well, and especially not when your goal there turns into "ensuring they see as much of the platform as possible to view your ads." That's before getting into the fact that we can't trust computers in the slightest, because they're too complex for even the people who make them to reason about, and our software is a hot mess - but, hey, we have tools to bring in all 2700 un-audited dependencies for the Electron app! Hey, where'd my crypto wallet contents go? Huh. Find someone who's done computer security for long, and they'll either be a weird off grid prepper or be planning for something of the sort, with nothing more complex than a microcontroller or two. We've tried, for north of a decade, and with a solid couple years of effort, to build human interaction with various forms of consumer tech intermediating all the interactions, and it's been an unmitigated disaster in no shortage of ways (David Sax's book The Future is Analog is a good survey of the topic). I've been having good results lately returning to analog human interaction around a campfire on a regular basis. That's before you get into the slave labor, near slave labor, and "I Can't Believe It's Not Slave Labor" that goes into pretty much all our modern devices - from the cobalt on up (Cobalt Red by Kara is a good read here, Dying for an iPhone is relevant, and there's no shortage of others). It's nasty, and behind every promise to do better seems to be some mechanism or another to further obfuscate the human labor going into the modern short lived electronics (because, of course, long lived devices are bad for profit). So, yeah. Good for him. The tech thing has rotted. Let's try something different.
- Animats 4y ago
  Anti-monopoly legislation and strong unions would work. They worked the last time things got too centralized, the era of railroads and steel. As with railroads and steel mills, what we now call "tech" has a scaling property which pushes towards monopoly. So there needs to be some force pushing back hard against monopolies.
andanotherthing 4y ago
I've been following Douglas Rushkoff for about a decade now. He's written books about this for the last 10-15 years, and his podcast 'team human'interviews some very interesting people. I don't know about this article, but Douglas is as real as they come. I'm not sure why people here are being cynical.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  Probably because The DR is as real as they come, and "it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it". Who wants to be told they're the reason civil society broke? Unfortunately for them, Nuremberg established a precedent where "just following orders" is not an excuse.
randcraw 4y ago
Nice article. It engagingly tells the 30 year evolution of Rushkoff's Philosophy of Technology from enthralled technophile to jaded techno-revile... one Rushkoff book at a time. At the same time, Malcolm Harris' able writing inevitably reminds the reader of the myriad changes to WiReD magazine over the same period -- from the premier forum for techno-evangelists of every stripe, to whatever its become 30 years hence, a mostly harmless mainstream media outlet that, every so often, shows a little spark of revisiting its former glory. As a long time subscriber, thanks for the memories, Malcolm.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jdkee 4y ago
[flagged]
cowmix 4y ago
We're all Bill Joy and Ted Kaczynski now.
blueridge 4y ago
Everyone should read Neil Postman's Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves To Death. Postman's 6 questions about technology: 1. “What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?” 2. “Whose problem is it?” 3. “Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution?” 4. “What new problems might be created because we have solved this problem?” 5. “What sort of people and institutions might acquire special economic and political power because of technological change?” 6. “What changes in language are being enforced by new technologies, and what is being gained and lost by such changes?” Also: Neil Postman on Technopoly (1992) and Collapse of Civilization https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFj6-z8KeeU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFj6-z8KeeU
- nico 4y ago
  Excellent questions Are we reducing or increasing suffering?
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    The answer is "yes" to both. We're changing some kinds of suffering and changing who it affects without really solving the fundamental problems humanity is facing. "Playing Tetris with problems" is how my father described it to me.
  - nullsense 4y ago
    We are hopelessly committed to both.
- Syonyk 4y ago
  Postman is well, well worth a read. His observations on TV, before the internet was ever really more than a curiosity, can be just as easily applied to what the internet tried to do. The problem is that we're not, collectively, any good at actually asking any questions before deciding some new bit of technological wizardry is worth using. We don't consider the opportunity cost (that's a lost concept these days), and the running question seems to be nothing beyond "Can I imagine some possible way in which I might find this useful?" If it turns out not to be, well, we're already in the system, and sunk cost fallacy applies hard. But, yes. Read Postman. He's very insightful.
drewbeck 4y ago
Techno optimism has always been naive about capitalism and about human relationships (especially at scale). If you let your disillusionment strip out the naivete and don't let it turn you bitter or resentful then you'll find there's still some good things in tech to be hopeful for, and good things in tech to work for.
lifeisstillgood 4y ago
The solutions suggested in the article: """ So what answers does Rushkoff offer? His programmatic conclusions in Survival are surprisingly conventional: “Buy local, engage in mutual aid, and support cooperatives. Use monopoly law to break up anticompetitive behemoths, environmental regulation to limit waste, and organized labor to promote the rights of gig workers. Reverse tax policy so that those receiving passive capital gains on their wealth pay higher rates than those actively working for their income.” """
monero-xmr 4y ago
Over a long enough time frame, you can’t fight economics and human desire. You might win for a long time, perhaps centuries, but eventually the black market desire for what the state has outlawed wins out. What I’m getting at is, regardless of how you feel about software and communications ruining society, it doesn’t matter if enough people like it. It is un-outlawable. See the state’s inability to really accomplish banning anything that humans desire - from the drug war to immigration restrictions. Even maximum security prisons are full of contraband. The state can’t do anything if the popular will overwhelmingly disagrees.
JanneVee 4y ago
One of my biggest gripes with the tech critique of Rushkoff (and Doctorow for that matter) is the insistence of bringing in their leftist politics into it. Go talk to any laissez-faire capitalist of the techs problems as they present them they would agree with them. The biggest problems today of tech is that the big corporations are doing regulatory capture and rent-seeking. Heck even going with the aspect of big corporations using behavior modification techniques for profit would have libertarians going WTF.
- worik 4y ago
  > One of my biggest gripes with the tech critique of Rushkoff (and Doctorow for that matter) is the insistence of bringing in their leftist politics into it. Really, because.... > The biggest problems today of tech is that the big corporations are doing regulatory capture and rent-seeking That is a left wing analysis. These days. I understand that there is a dry economic analysis, usually associated with the right, that criticises regulatory capture and rent-seeking, but it is not part of the current, dominant, right wing analysis. These days being anti "regulatory capture and rent-seeking" is a left wing position. The position Doctorow takes
  - JanneVee 4y ago
    That is why I tried to qualify it with "Go talk to any laissez-faire capitalist " without that little bit of qualification you are trying to ignore my argument and say it is all left wing. My point is that there is common ground here and having the people that has written and thought deeply of the problems decided of instead of trying fix it go on try to abolish capitalism instead which is a fools errand leaving us worse off.
nologic01 4y ago
Sometimes its "better late than never". Sometimes its "too little too late". The next few years will reveal the true nature of the "digital revolution" Digital tech is unlike any tech before. It is general purpose, malleable, reprogrammable, with active IO and feedback loops with the human realm. It does have some "genes" and biases in the form of chip design and specialization, but this pales compared to the phenotype diversity of everything that can "run" on it. The worldwide surface of silicon chips creates thus a blank slate that captures and reflects like a mirror an ever increasing slice of our condition. If the digital image is going dark its because our societies are currently regressing. The accelerating dehumanising journey of digital tech is a direct reflection of long lived, pre-existing latent beliefs that deny people of essential human dimensions: agency, social bonds, inner spaces and spirituality, harmonious coexistence with nature. Reclaiming this digital exo-brain (that is cabable for the worst and the best) by the forces of the broader humanistic movement is the prime objective. Humanity's journey towards ubuntu is long and tortured. Ripping hearts of captives to please imaginary gods in public spectacles was yesterday. The debilitating thought is that we are past redemption. That the emergent behavior from shapping the mirror of social media platforms and surveillance devices has pulled us into a twilight zone with no escape. My gut feeling is that it is not yet so dire. It may get there in the mid-term future. What we need to do is make humanism viral. It exists not because of some idealists but because its inate and congruent with what people want. It needs to get reflected in the digital mirror. It already does at the edges. As open source software. As collaboration platforms like wikipedia and openstreetmaps. As the fediverse. Lets hope and work towards moving it to the center.
onetokeoverthe 4y ago
[dead]
fsflover 4y ago
We should support Electronic Frontier Foundation https://eff.org https://eff.org fighting against mega-corporations and companies which respect your privacy and freedom: https://puri.sm/products https://puri.sm/products https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v13/ https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v13/ https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide https://ryf.fsf.org https://ryf.fsf.org
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  I disagree. EFF, FSF, GNU, etc is fanaticism as opposed to a realistic, pragmatic solution. There is nothing wrong with paid, proprietary software. We've had proprietary software all the time but it's only in the last decade, since the rise of the spyware industry, "attention economy" and social media that computing became the shit-show it currently is. That is the root cause of our current problem, not proprietary software itself. Proprietary software is fine as long as it plays fair or is kept in check with things like adversarial interoperability being made legal.
teekert 4y ago
In related news, Doug Rushkoff is getting old and the world is ready for a new generation of techno-optimists.
jacquesm 4y ago
Once upon a time I told my computer what to do. If I give this stuff so much as a hairs width of room it will try to tell me what to do. The needy software that tries to push its way into your life is everywhere. Very frustrating to me is that I feel that I've helped bring a part of this into this world. The internet gave us advertising free direct peer-to-peer communications in text, video and audio and then took it all away again.
EGreg 4y ago
Journalists love to write about problems: https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/24/internet-lost-its-way-tim-berners-lee-world-wide-web https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/24/internet-... I got them to publish my piece for example: https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-can-find-a-new-one/amp https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c... But not the solutions! Those we have to publish ourselves: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/

139 points by fortran77 4y ago

Archived: https://archive.ph/2023.05.11-115448/https://www.wired.com/story/doug-rushkoff-survival-of-the-richest/ https://archive.ph/2023.05.11-115448/https://www.wired.com/s...

hemmert 4y ago

It's so good to see this movement gaining momentum.

Animats 4y ago
Not really. It's too diffuse. The closest thing we have to a counterculture is the MAGA movement, and their leader is a billionaire. No mob is marching up to 3000 Sand Hill Road yelling "String them up!"
- iamdamian 4y ago
  Don't most movements start as diffuse changes in sentiment?
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    I think many appear that way but only due to successful astroturfing.
    - iamdamian 4y ago
      According to The Affluent Society [0], a seminal book that established the idea of "conventional wisdom", most movements start with diffuse sentiment changes and then crystallize into a "changing of the guard" only after time has allowed a group to recognize that the general attitude has shifted. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Affluent_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Affluent_Society
      - cjbgkagh 4y ago
        The only reason I care what economist think is so that I can best avoid the havok they wreak.
- confoundcofound 4y ago
  The MAGA movement has a strong anti-VC-and-BigTech bent. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do take action.
  - vkou 4y ago
    They also have a strong fascist and cult of personality and authoritarian bent, expecting them to be your saviours is a juice that isn't worth the squeeze.
    - confoundcofound 4y ago
      [flagged]
    - moomoo11 4y ago
      lol. Everyone in politics wants to be someone’s savior.
  - r00fus 4y ago
    The MAGA movement has been coopted, and all the seemingly grassroots activity is being astroturfed by influencers who are being paid by big money. Cooption is not unique to that movement. Others (some on the left) have been coopted as well.
    - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
      The MAGA movement isn't coopted, it's a wholly artificial creation. Some of it is driven by grift (gold coins, prepper supplies, assault weapons...) Some by political opportunism. Some by nihilistic accelerationism. Absolutely none of it is a genuinely organic spontaneous bottom-up movement. That turns out to be one of the worst things about the Internet. It just doesn't amplify culture. Bad actors with significant resources can use it to steer culture. Any billionaire can seed a political movement now, and significantly influence elections. That's a ridiculous amount of power and it has absolutely no democratic oversight. To an extent that's always been true of media ownership. But where early 20th c. print was very much print-and-hope, with the Internet you can get almost instant real-time feedback of how an influence campaign is doing. And if it's not working you can adjust it to order. At some point soon this whole process will fully automated, with AI running bot farms, creating content, supervising and steering forums, and collecting and personalising prospect details, all without human participation.
- worik 4y ago
  >....The closest thing we have to a counterculture is the MAGA movement That is tragic, if true. It is not true, here, thousands of miles, and across an ocean, away (-45.75, 170.57) Counter-cultures pumping here
AndrewKemendo 4y ago
Yes, though I wish we had a better town square to organize around
southernplaces7 4y ago
Technology isn't entirely bad, many aspects of our modern digitized word are indeed good and the vast majority of the world at least tacitly agrees with their existence (Doug Rushkoff certainly doesn't stop himself from fully using the "digital revolution" to promote himself. But, one can believe that and also viciously reject swathes of the dehumanizing people-are-data-KPIs-and-eyeballs-to-be-monetized surveillance world of algorithmic controls, non-human interfaces and other grotesque idiocies perpetuated by modern tech megacorps and their mini techcorp lead followers. Not to even speak of governments taking on the same attitudes. This second aspect of the digital revolution is certainly grotesque and very dangerous.

prepend 4y ago

> Some weeks after my visit, Silicon Valley Bank failed and nearly dragged the global financial system down along with it—a direct result of the Trump administration’s deregulation agenda. Really? This seems kind of far afield. How is SVB due to Trump?

photon12 4y ago
There used to be stricter capital requirements and oversight for regional banks, until: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-signs-law-rolling-back-post-financial-crisis-banking-rules/2018/05/24/077e3aa8-5f6c-11e8-a4a4-c070ef53f315_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-signs-... See also: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/silicon-valley-bank-collapse-puts-new-spotlight-2018-bank-deregulation-rcna74655 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/silicon-valley-ban...
0x445442 4y ago
TDS manifests itself in many ways. Blaming the failure of SVB on Trump is just one of them.

Apocryphon 4y ago

Hasn’t this been Jaron Lanier’s shtick for years, too? And all he gets is WIRED articles as well.

fortran77 4y ago
Read the article.
lukifer 4y ago
They’re both thoughtful and nuanced in analyzing the promise and peril of the relationship between technology and civil society, as well as economic perverse incentives. Strong recommend for “Who Owns The Future?”, every bit as relevant 10 years after publication.

aaron695 4y ago

[dead]

CyberDildonics 4y ago

This is basically an ad (like everything in wired) for his latest book talking about the worst aspects of the latest technology. It says tech billionaires are bad and drops all the usual names even though there is no new information. I'm almost impressed with the amount wired can stretch out vapid nonsense into an article. There is a photo of the guy sitting in a bathtub with a laptop for some reason and a photo of him in his office with a radial zoom filter for some reason. It's basically an article about a guy's book that is written about other news articles.

23B1 4y ago
I mean, WIRED has been shilling for this crap since the beginning – it's only fitting that they capitalize on the backlash :\

Syonyk 4y ago

No real surprise. A good number of people who have grown up with the promise of the tech are pretty well disgusted by what it's turned out to deliver, which is mostly "A handful of multibillionaires treating the rest of us as sets of eyeballs to be monetized at all possible costs." I'm certainly there. I grew up with the promises of the internet, and I have to agree with Doctorow about "Enshitification." Most of the promised stuff has turned out to have some pretty nasty side effects and consequences. Turns out, humans don't scale to a global conversation very well, and especially not when your goal there turns into "ensuring they see as much of the platform as possible to view your ads." That's before getting into the fact that we can't trust computers in the slightest, because they're too complex for even the people who make them to reason about, and our software is a hot mess - but, hey, we have tools to bring in all 2700 un-audited dependencies for the Electron app! Hey, where'd my crypto wallet contents go? Huh. Find someone who's done computer security for long, and they'll either be a weird off grid prepper or be planning for something of the sort, with nothing more complex than a microcontroller or two. We've tried, for north of a decade, and with a solid couple years of effort, to build human interaction with various forms of consumer tech intermediating all the interactions, and it's been an unmitigated disaster in no shortage of ways (David Sax's book The Future is Analog is a good survey of the topic). I've been having good results lately returning to analog human interaction around a campfire on a regular basis. That's before you get into the slave labor, near slave labor, and "I Can't Believe It's Not Slave Labor" that goes into pretty much all our modern devices - from the cobalt on up (Cobalt Red by Kara is a good read here, Dying for an iPhone is relevant, and there's no shortage of others). It's nasty, and behind every promise to do better seems to be some mechanism or another to further obfuscate the human labor going into the modern short lived electronics (because, of course, long lived devices are bad for profit). So, yeah. Good for him. The tech thing has rotted. Let's try something different.

Animats 4y ago
Anti-monopoly legislation and strong unions would work. They worked the last time things got too centralized, the era of railroads and steel. As with railroads and steel mills, what we now call "tech" has a scaling property which pushes towards monopoly. So there needs to be some force pushing back hard against monopolies.

andanotherthing 4y ago

I've been following Douglas Rushkoff for about a decade now. He's written books about this for the last 10-15 years, and his podcast 'team human'interviews some very interesting people. I don't know about this article, but Douglas is as real as they come. I'm not sure why people here are being cynical.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
Probably because The DR is as real as they come, and "it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it". Who wants to be told they're the reason civil society broke? Unfortunately for them, Nuremberg established a precedent where "just following orders" is not an excuse.

randcraw 4y ago

Nice article. It engagingly tells the 30 year evolution of Rushkoff's Philosophy of Technology from enthralled technophile to jaded techno-revile... one Rushkoff book at a time. At the same time, Malcolm Harris' able writing inevitably reminds the reader of the myriad changes to WiReD magazine over the same period -- from the premier forum for techno-evangelists of every stripe, to whatever its become 30 years hence, a mostly harmless mainstream media outlet that, every so often, shows a little spark of revisiting its former glory. As a long time subscriber, thanks for the memories, Malcolm.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jdkee 4y ago

[flagged]

cowmix 4y ago

We're all Bill Joy and Ted Kaczynski now.

blueridge 4y ago

Everyone should read Neil Postman's Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves To Death. Postman's 6 questions about technology: 1. “What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?” 2. “Whose problem is it?” 3. “Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution?” 4. “What new problems might be created because we have solved this problem?” 5. “What sort of people and institutions might acquire special economic and political power because of technological change?” 6. “What changes in language are being enforced by new technologies, and what is being gained and lost by such changes?” Also: Neil Postman on Technopoly (1992) and Collapse of Civilization https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFj6-z8KeeU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFj6-z8KeeU

nico 4y ago
Excellent questions Are we reducing or increasing suffering?
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  The answer is "yes" to both. We're changing some kinds of suffering and changing who it affects without really solving the fundamental problems humanity is facing. "Playing Tetris with problems" is how my father described it to me.
- nullsense 4y ago
  We are hopelessly committed to both.
Syonyk 4y ago
Postman is well, well worth a read. His observations on TV, before the internet was ever really more than a curiosity, can be just as easily applied to what the internet tried to do. The problem is that we're not, collectively, any good at actually asking any questions before deciding some new bit of technological wizardry is worth using. We don't consider the opportunity cost (that's a lost concept these days), and the running question seems to be nothing beyond "Can I imagine some possible way in which I might find this useful?" If it turns out not to be, well, we're already in the system, and sunk cost fallacy applies hard. But, yes. Read Postman. He's very insightful.

drewbeck 4y ago

Techno optimism has always been naive about capitalism and about human relationships (especially at scale). If you let your disillusionment strip out the naivete and don't let it turn you bitter or resentful then you'll find there's still some good things in tech to be hopeful for, and good things in tech to work for.

lifeisstillgood 4y ago

The solutions suggested in the article: """ So what answers does Rushkoff offer? His programmatic conclusions in Survival are surprisingly conventional: “Buy local, engage in mutual aid, and support cooperatives. Use monopoly law to break up anticompetitive behemoths, environmental regulation to limit waste, and organized labor to promote the rights of gig workers. Reverse tax policy so that those receiving passive capital gains on their wealth pay higher rates than those actively working for their income.” """

monero-xmr 4y ago

Over a long enough time frame, you can’t fight economics and human desire. You might win for a long time, perhaps centuries, but eventually the black market desire for what the state has outlawed wins out. What I’m getting at is, regardless of how you feel about software and communications ruining society, it doesn’t matter if enough people like it. It is un-outlawable. See the state’s inability to really accomplish banning anything that humans desire - from the drug war to immigration restrictions. Even maximum security prisons are full of contraband. The state can’t do anything if the popular will overwhelmingly disagrees.

JanneVee 4y ago

One of my biggest gripes with the tech critique of Rushkoff (and Doctorow for that matter) is the insistence of bringing in their leftist politics into it. Go talk to any laissez-faire capitalist of the techs problems as they present them they would agree with them. The biggest problems today of tech is that the big corporations are doing regulatory capture and rent-seeking. Heck even going with the aspect of big corporations using behavior modification techniques for profit would have libertarians going WTF.

worik 4y ago
> One of my biggest gripes with the tech critique of Rushkoff (and Doctorow for that matter) is the insistence of bringing in their leftist politics into it. Really, because.... > The biggest problems today of tech is that the big corporations are doing regulatory capture and rent-seeking That is a left wing analysis. These days. I understand that there is a dry economic analysis, usually associated with the right, that criticises regulatory capture and rent-seeking, but it is not part of the current, dominant, right wing analysis. These days being anti "regulatory capture and rent-seeking" is a left wing position. The position Doctorow takes
- JanneVee 4y ago
  That is why I tried to qualify it with "Go talk to any laissez-faire capitalist " without that little bit of qualification you are trying to ignore my argument and say it is all left wing. My point is that there is common ground here and having the people that has written and thought deeply of the problems decided of instead of trying fix it go on try to abolish capitalism instead which is a fools errand leaving us worse off.

nologic01 4y ago

Sometimes its "better late than never". Sometimes its "too little too late". The next few years will reveal the true nature of the "digital revolution" Digital tech is unlike any tech before. It is general purpose, malleable, reprogrammable, with active IO and feedback loops with the human realm. It does have some "genes" and biases in the form of chip design and specialization, but this pales compared to the phenotype diversity of everything that can "run" on it. The worldwide surface of silicon chips creates thus a blank slate that captures and reflects like a mirror an ever increasing slice of our condition. If the digital image is going dark its because our societies are currently regressing. The accelerating dehumanising journey of digital tech is a direct reflection of long lived, pre-existing latent beliefs that deny people of essential human dimensions: agency, social bonds, inner spaces and spirituality, harmonious coexistence with nature. Reclaiming this digital exo-brain (that is cabable for the worst and the best) by the forces of the broader humanistic movement is the prime objective. Humanity's journey towards ubuntu is long and tortured. Ripping hearts of captives to please imaginary gods in public spectacles was yesterday. The debilitating thought is that we are past redemption. That the emergent behavior from shapping the mirror of social media platforms and surveillance devices has pulled us into a twilight zone with no escape. My gut feeling is that it is not yet so dire. It may get there in the mid-term future. What we need to do is make humanism viral. It exists not because of some idealists but because its inate and congruent with what people want. It needs to get reflected in the digital mirror. It already does at the edges. As open source software. As collaboration platforms like wikipedia and openstreetmaps. As the fediverse. Lets hope and work towards moving it to the center.

onetokeoverthe 4y ago

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fsflover 4y ago

We should support Electronic Frontier Foundation https://eff.org https://eff.org fighting against mega-corporations and companies which respect your privacy and freedom: https://puri.sm/products https://puri.sm/products https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v13/ https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v13/ https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide https://ryf.fsf.org https://ryf.fsf.org

Nextgrid 4y ago
I disagree. EFF, FSF, GNU, etc is fanaticism as opposed to a realistic, pragmatic solution. There is nothing wrong with paid, proprietary software. We've had proprietary software all the time but it's only in the last decade, since the rise of the spyware industry, "attention economy" and social media that computing became the shit-show it currently is. That is the root cause of our current problem, not proprietary software itself. Proprietary software is fine as long as it plays fair or is kept in check with things like adversarial interoperability being made legal.

teekert 4y ago

In related news, Doug Rushkoff is getting old and the world is ready for a new generation of techno-optimists.

jacquesm 4y ago

Once upon a time I told my computer what to do. If I give this stuff so much as a hairs width of room it will try to tell me what to do. The needy software that tries to push its way into your life is everywhere. Very frustrating to me is that I feel that I've helped bring a part of this into this world. The internet gave us advertising free direct peer-to-peer communications in text, video and audio and then took it all away again.

EGreg 4y ago

Journalists love to write about problems: https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/24/internet-lost-its-way-tim-berners-lee-world-wide-web https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/24/internet-... I got them to publish my piece for example: https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-can-find-a-new-one/amp https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c... But not the solutions! Those we have to publish ourselves: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/