One particular instantiation of... > Technology is not apolitical or value-neutral. They don't inevitably make peoples' lives better (especially when it comes

One particular instantiation of... > Technology is not apolitical or value-neutral. They don't inevitably make peoples' lives better (especially when it comes to systemic issues like income or wealth inequality). ...would be to substitute "technology" with "markets". Karl Polanyi wrote an entire book (The Great Transformation) about precisely this point. > It can. It absolutely can do good things. But only if there's political will behind those decisions. It isn't automatic, and it isn't by default. And the only way we'll get from here to there is to care about the things Marc Andressen decries: Social responsibility, tech ethics, Radical CS, etc. There's a direct parallel here to what Polanyi called "social embededness". Stealing from Wikipedia... > Polanyi argued that in non-market societies there are no pure economic institutions to which formal economic models can be applied. In these cases economic activities such as "provisioning" are "embedded" in non-economic kinship, religious and political institutions. And by contrast, that market societies attempt to "disembed" economic action and claim that markets are some Platonic ideal existing outside their social context, which leads to all sorts of irrational and strange outcomes. To tie it back to technology, I think what we're seeing today is precisely the same, but rather than economic action in markets, it is a cluster of affordances from technology at scale (ubiquitous mobile computing, the cloud, etc). Techno-solutionists/optimists want to believe that "technology" exists disembeded from social context, and that it is a pure, higher thing beyond and above the petty squabbles of politics and culture. (And I mean, taking metaphors at face value... it's called THE CLOUD. Even the name suggests it being above and beyond mere human ken.)