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> I hope others are thinking about these questions and I’m not being a wet blanket. I wasn't, specifically. But they feel like specialisations or subclasses of
by the_other 3y ago
> I hope others are thinking about these questions and I’m not being a wet blanket.
I wasn't, specifically. But they feel like specialisations or subclasses of the general unease I feel about a lot of our contemporary tech.
As an example: I've grown to hate most social tech, mainly because of the tracking. But the mental image I used to get me off it was to imagine Zuck sitting in on all my conversations, silently taking notes. You wouldn't tolerate that, even if it wasn't Zuck. And yet we do.
Many of us are willing to remove the human connection, the effort to learn, the struggle to express from our day to day lives. It's the learning and struggle that gives extra value to the encounters we have and the situations we make. To me, using a lot of this technology feels like giving away something of what makes life worth living. (I understand the convenience; I get that "it's just a tool", I use tools all the time, I'm willing to engage with this new stuff to learn more about it, but slowly).
The worst is that we're giving that effort, that learning, that struggle (and its impact on us) to unaccountable entities which can bypass the social contracts we would normally make with one another, and which can scale up profit from that donation, thereby also devaluing our own labours and experiences to enrich a small few. Open source mitigates some of that, but most users would still be giving up their own embodiment of their creative acts.
- xp84 3y agoThe note-taking analogy isn’t exactly bad or wrong, but… maybe I’m naïve, but I just don’t see where the incentives are to do anything with all these notes on our behavior beyond just mining it for possible marketing opportunities, which has just never bothered me. There are certainly classes of individuals, such as spies, very important journalists, celebrities, etc. who it might be worth it to tap into the raw data illicitly before it is purged, anonymized, summarized into oblivion. But that is true of things like the telephone network as well: it’s a data stream which is not guaranteed to be fully secure (cops can wiretap, or a crooked engineer at the phone company could gain access to listen in too). But those risks don’t seem to materialize in a way that matters to most people. So I’m as bothered by it as I am having a conversation in a restaurant: I wouldn’t yell out my SSN but overall I am pretty confident nobody cares about what I’m saying besides my intended listener.
- kian 3y agoMost people will be neither murdered nor know anyone who was - and yet we still have laws to prevent such things. Are you not bothered by such crimes because they won't be likely to happen to you or most normal people?
- gffrd 3y ago> we're giving that effort, that learning, that struggle (and its impact on us) to unaccountable entities Boy did this ring true. We're engaging with parties that are able to exhibit an immense amount of power over our lives, and have NO skin in our game: we'll be the ones left cleaning up the pieces after their party is over.