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That current technological advancement has the potential to be positive, at best, or at least benign. I love coding, but my attitude has changed based on what
by shever73 3y ago
That current technological advancement has the potential to be positive, at best, or at least benign.
I love coding, but my attitude has changed based on what I see big tech doing. Google, Facebook and Amazon particularly seem to be dead set on the enshittification of everything. It’s hard for me to see things as anything other than negative overall.
- mindcrime 3y agoSounds like we are thinking along very similar lines. Which leads me to wonder: have you by any chance read Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow? I read it a year or so ago, and my takeaway from it was that he is advocating a mindset of something like "Don't try to use technology to 'beat' the powerful players (corporations, governments, whatever) as they can always out-tech you. Rather, use tech to foster/facilitate policy change in beneficial ways." That's a rough paraphrase from memory, but I think it gets a chunk of the gist of what he was saying. And to the extent that it does, I think he has a point. I think a lot of us techie types, especially the ones who did grow up on a healthy dose of cyberpunk and other sci-fi (and who didn't?) envision an ability to "win" in a contest between nation-state governments and/or powerful multi-national corporations. And in hindsight, maybe that is exactly our fatal conceit, and a view we need to shed.
- shever73 3y agoI haven’t read that, but thanks for the recommendation. That definitely sounds like a more positive philosophy.