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Yes and: TLDR: Technology is intrinsically political. I'm grateful that HN informed me about right-to-repair, EFF, privacy, cybersecurity, and so forth. I wa

Yes and: TLDR: Technology is intrinsically political. I'm grateful that HN informed me about right-to-repair, EFF, privacy, cybersecurity, and so forth. I was so upset I when the Clinton Admin promoted the Clipper chip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip I can't believe we're still arguing about the issue (right to use encryption) today. That was probably the first time I realized that politics had real impact on my world. Coincidentally, Neil Postman's book Technopoly was my gateway drug into criticism (Ted Nelson's Computer Lib, McLuhan, Chomsky, Donald Norman, etc, etc). Transmuted me from a naive optimistic technophile into a skeptic. Then the (now evergreen) electronic voting and tabulation debacle radicalized me. I just couldn't believe that otherwise intelligent people supported that crap. Then I tried (and failed) to protect personal privacy (electronic medical records, secret ballots). It makes me crazy when people, like geeks and policy makers and bosses, who I think should know better, advocate for stuff that can't be true. I've tried to explain that perpetual motion machines simply aren't possible. Making me sound like the nutter. (One of our local papers called me a "sweaty paranoid kook" for having the gall to correct their misunderstandings over how voting with postal ballots works. That was fun.) (Workwise, I got a soft demotion when I/we tried to explain to the boss that the blackbox demographic database they licensed (without our knowledge) simply doesn't work. "How can that be true?! Everyone else is using this database." Ya, sure, believe the sales pukes over your own team. Terrific.) So. I don't know how to separate technology from politics. It's unfortunate that everything swiftly gets coded as partisan. Whereas I see everything in terms of punching up vs down; our popular culture persists in making everything a team sport. -- FWIW, Joshua Citarella (Do Not Research, Doomscroll, etc) is probably the most cogent contemporary critic I follow today. Initially, Citarella just wanted to figure out how to be a working artist. As in "get paid to produce culture". He (and his community) ingested acres of knowledge and have synthesized a largely coherent worldview (criticism of platform economics, neoliberalism). Helping me to gel and articulate my own worldview, forged over the decades of working on the frontlines of technology and policy. -- Absolutely, I'd rather spend my time programming, solving problems, tinkering, hanging out with my peers, talking shit. Alas, the real world continues to conspire to deprive me of these simple pleasures. Makes me cranky. I choose to fight back.

BLKNSLVR 1y ago
My moment was when the Australian Liberal Party destroyed the previous government's plan to rollout fiber to the premises to 90-odd percent of the Australian population. They stole a decade of fiber internet from me because they wanted to play politics. They rolled out new copper in some areas for goodness sake. They said they were technology agnostic, they said something better than fiber may come along, yet they rolled out copper. Said a lot about their competence. It was disgusting. It set Australia's technology landscape back by a decade (it didn't just affect me, it affected the entire industry in which I worked, which is a foundational industry to almost all others - what does not depend on communications infrastructure these days?). Somewhat at the behest of Rupert Murdoch, who's not even an Australian citizen anymore, to protect his interests in the dinosaurs of traditional media. The roots of the issue also stem from the privatisation of the owner of most of Australia's communications infrastructure a number of years before that - also a great decision of the same political party. I don't know how / why people can still take them seriously (I do know, but that's actually worse). Both sides of politics are biased and corrupt to some extent, but only one side has burned me to that degree on something I actually cared about. Separately, it's only niche political parties that actually seem to care much about the privacy invasion that's rampant on the internet. No major parties seem to have any willpower to take that on. The ongoing attacks on encryption, including the ridiculous comments from Australian Prime Minister at the time Malcolm Turnbull about the laws of Australia overlooking the laws of mathematics. SMFH. When technology is woven into our daily lives it cannot be apolitical.
- BLKNSLVR 1y ago
  I should have included this link to one of my favourite pieces of graffiti as regards the bastardised NBN rollout: https://preview.redd.it/l0q7wkqc92z11.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=cb17b465bf1f903ad549701a97f05d31585c3df3 https://preview.redd.it/l0q7wkqc92z11.jpg?width=640&crop=sma...
qhiliq 1y ago
For anyone into this vein of criticism, I highly recommend `The Technological Society` By Jacques Ellul [0]. Among other things it makes the point (paraphrasing poorly) that politics is intrinsically technological. More precisely, he says modern politics and technology are both instances of the same underlying process of "technique". It's heavily informed my way of looking at technology, politics, and their interconnection. [0]: https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSociety https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...

BLKNSLVR 1y ago

My moment was when the Australian Liberal Party destroyed the previous government's plan to rollout fiber to the premises to 90-odd percent of the Australian population. They stole a decade of fiber internet from me because they wanted to play politics. They rolled out new copper in some areas for goodness sake. They said they were technology agnostic, they said something better than fiber may come along, yet they rolled out copper. Said a lot about their competence. It was disgusting. It set Australia's technology landscape back by a decade (it didn't just affect me, it affected the entire industry in which I worked, which is a foundational industry to almost all others - what does not depend on communications infrastructure these days?). Somewhat at the behest of Rupert Murdoch, who's not even an Australian citizen anymore, to protect his interests in the dinosaurs of traditional media. The roots of the issue also stem from the privatisation of the owner of most of Australia's communications infrastructure a number of years before that - also a great decision of the same political party. I don't know how / why people can still take them seriously (I do know, but that's actually worse). Both sides of politics are biased and corrupt to some extent, but only one side has burned me to that degree on something I actually cared about. Separately, it's only niche political parties that actually seem to care much about the privacy invasion that's rampant on the internet. No major parties seem to have any willpower to take that on. The ongoing attacks on encryption, including the ridiculous comments from Australian Prime Minister at the time Malcolm Turnbull about the laws of Australia overlooking the laws of mathematics. SMFH. When technology is woven into our daily lives it cannot be apolitical.

BLKNSLVR 1y ago
I should have included this link to one of my favourite pieces of graffiti as regards the bastardised NBN rollout: https://preview.redd.it/l0q7wkqc92z11.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=cb17b465bf1f903ad549701a97f05d31585c3df3 https://preview.redd.it/l0q7wkqc92z11.jpg?width=640&crop=sma...

qhiliq 1y ago

For anyone into this vein of criticism, I highly recommend `The Technological Society` By Jacques Ellul [0]. Among other things it makes the point (paraphrasing poorly) that politics is intrinsically technological. More precisely, he says modern politics and technology are both instances of the same underlying process of "technique". It's heavily informed my way of looking at technology, politics, and their interconnection. [0]: https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSociety https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...