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The problem here is the oppression, not the computers. An "Access Control System" is a banal piece of software that decides who to let in and who to keep out. H

The problem here is the oppression, not the computers. An "Access Control System" is a banal piece of software that decides who to let in and who to keep out. Hotels, banks, golf clubs ... and oppressive regimes, they all use one. You could also write an article on "The Use of Clothing to Support Oppression", and again, the problem is not with the clothes.

scarmig 14y ago
That's too blase for my taste. Technologies are transformative: they create the opportunities for agents to commit entirely new kinds of actions, good and bad. You can't decouple their existence from the new things that result from them (from Nazi death camps to apartheid to the contemporary Panopticon State), any more than you can try to decouple, say, totalitarian political systems from the oppression they entail. This doesn't mean that we should smash all our technology and all return to the farm. It just means we've got to think critically and pro-actively about how to make sure technology is used for good.
- zenogais 14y ago
  I have to disagree here. Technology itself clearly is not something that you can "make sure..is used for good". The problem is not with any one piece of technology (eg. the computer) or technology as the sum of all individual technologies. I see the root of the problem being technologizing. Oppression is more oppressive because we've technologized it. Totalitarian governments are more controlling because they've technologized control. The essence of technology is control. The plow let farmers control where and what things grew in an area of land. The hydroelectric dam controls the flow of an entire river to generate electricity. Your cellphone lets you control personal and professional interactions. Control and technology are deeply connected. That is why technology is both dangerous and beneficial. Technologies are not transformative they are indicative of trends in the larger field of control/power.
  - scarmig 14y ago
    I'm not sure we disagree. I'd phrase my core logic as this. Historically, most really big things, great or terrible, have been done by centralized states. Central to state-building, though, is the concept of legibility: making information about the world understandable to the State and making it so that the State can efficiently use and act on that information to enact its will on the world. And technology--particularly telecommunications, including spoken language, counting, writing, roads, the printing press, arithmetic, ship building, radio, all the way up to computer programming--is all about legibility. Every advance in technology extends the State's power, and that continues today. That's why Lenin could hop on a train in 1917 and drop straight into absolutist Russia without anyone in charge noticing. Then in the 1980s the apartheid government had the ability to effectively track the movements and contacts of dissidents and activists. And today the US federal government can call up a couple contacts and know everything about you, from how many times a week you get a coffee from the store at the corner to what you were thinking and searching for online on January 4, 2010, after lunch. I'd agree that it was unrealistic for me to say we can direct how technology will end up being used. It's obviously true that you can't really direct it, nor can you really avoid it by ignoring it and hoping it goes away. What's now important for being proactive is building technology that will make human actions less legible and less subject to control by external forces.
  - gbog 14y ago
    > Technology itself clearly is not something that you can "make sure..is used for good". Why not? There is not one infallible way to ensure a technology is used for good and you never know in advance but it is not a reason to stop trying. I'd say for example that open formats and protocols are more likely to generate less evil than their counterparts.
gbog 14y ago
How do you place yourself in regards of military nuclear technology, then?

scarmig 14y ago

That's too blase for my taste. Technologies are transformative: they create the opportunities for agents to commit entirely new kinds of actions, good and bad. You can't decouple their existence from the new things that result from them (from Nazi death camps to apartheid to the contemporary Panopticon State), any more than you can try to decouple, say, totalitarian political systems from the oppression they entail. This doesn't mean that we should smash all our technology and all return to the farm. It just means we've got to think critically and pro-actively about how to make sure technology is used for good.

zenogais 14y ago
I have to disagree here. Technology itself clearly is not something that you can "make sure..is used for good". The problem is not with any one piece of technology (eg. the computer) or technology as the sum of all individual technologies. I see the root of the problem being technologizing. Oppression is more oppressive because we've technologized it. Totalitarian governments are more controlling because they've technologized control. The essence of technology is control. The plow let farmers control where and what things grew in an area of land. The hydroelectric dam controls the flow of an entire river to generate electricity. Your cellphone lets you control personal and professional interactions. Control and technology are deeply connected. That is why technology is both dangerous and beneficial. Technologies are not transformative they are indicative of trends in the larger field of control/power.
- scarmig 14y ago
  I'm not sure we disagree. I'd phrase my core logic as this. Historically, most really big things, great or terrible, have been done by centralized states. Central to state-building, though, is the concept of legibility: making information about the world understandable to the State and making it so that the State can efficiently use and act on that information to enact its will on the world. And technology--particularly telecommunications, including spoken language, counting, writing, roads, the printing press, arithmetic, ship building, radio, all the way up to computer programming--is all about legibility. Every advance in technology extends the State's power, and that continues today. That's why Lenin could hop on a train in 1917 and drop straight into absolutist Russia without anyone in charge noticing. Then in the 1980s the apartheid government had the ability to effectively track the movements and contacts of dissidents and activists. And today the US federal government can call up a couple contacts and know everything about you, from how many times a week you get a coffee from the store at the corner to what you were thinking and searching for online on January 4, 2010, after lunch. I'd agree that it was unrealistic for me to say we can direct how technology will end up being used. It's obviously true that you can't really direct it, nor can you really avoid it by ignoring it and hoping it goes away. What's now important for being proactive is building technology that will make human actions less legible and less subject to control by external forces.
- gbog 14y ago
  > Technology itself clearly is not something that you can "make sure..is used for good". Why not? There is not one infallible way to ensure a technology is used for good and you never know in advance but it is not a reason to stop trying. I'd say for example that open formats and protocols are more likely to generate less evil than their counterparts.

gbog 14y ago

How do you place yourself in regards of military nuclear technology, then?