I'm tired of pretending tech makes things better.
I'm tired of kidding myself that all these apps, these chatbots, these "tools" are doing anything but dragging us into the mud and the shit and calling it progress.
I sat down at a cafe a few days ago, hungry and ready
I didn’t find the article particularly insightful but I don’t like your way of thinking about tech. Technology and society make each other together. Obviously, technology choices like mass transit vs cars shape our lives in ways that the pens example doesn’t help us explain. Similarly, society shapes the way that we make technology. Technology is constrained by the rules of the physical world, but that is an underconstraint. The leftover space (i.e. the vast majority) is the process through which we embed social values into the technology. To return to the example of mass transit vs cars, these obviously have different embedded values within them, which then go on to shape the world that we make around them.
This way of thinking helps explain why computer technology specifically is so awful: Computers are shockingly general purpose in a way that has no parallel in physical products. This means that the underconstraining is more pronounced, so social values have an even more outsized say in how they get made. This is why every other software product is just the pure manifestation of capitalism in a way that a robotic arm could never be.
edit to add that this argument is adapted from Andrew Feenberg’s “Transforming Technology”
I like the way you argument but I’m not able to grasp what you try to say entirely. English isn’t my native language, this may play into it.
I. e this sentence.:) Would you rephrase it and give an additional example?
I kind of get the mass transit vs. cars example. Although I think both options have their advantages and disadvantages. It becomes very apparent to me when… Lets say, when you give everyone a car and send them all together into rush hour and transform our cities into something well suited for cars but not so much for people. But that doesn’t make the wheel or the engine evil in itself.
Also: The society and and it’s values affects technology which in turn affects the environment the society lives in. Yes, I get that when I think i.e. about the industrialisation in the 19th century.
I struggle with the idea that a tool (like a computer) is bad because is too general purpose. Society hence the people and their values define how the tool is used. Would you elaborate on that? I’d like to understand the idea.
No problem!
Example: Let’s say that there’s a factory, and the factory has a machine that makes whatever. The machine takes 2 people to operate. The thing needs to get made, so that limits the number of possible designs, but there are still many open questions like, for example, should the workers face each other or face away from each other? The boss might make them face away from each other, that way they don’t chat and get distracted. If the workers get to choose, they’d prefer to face each other to make the work more pleasant. In this way, the values of society are embedded in the design of the machine itself.
I love computers! It’s not that they’re bad, but that, because they’re so general purpose, more cultural values get embedded. Like in the example above, there are decisions that aren’t determined by the goals of what you’re trying to accomplish, but because computers are so much more open ended than physical robots, there are more decisions like that, and you have even more leeway in how they’re decided.
I agree with you that good/evil is not a productive way to think about it, just like I don’t think neutrality is right either. Instead, I think that our technology contains within it a reflection of who got to make those many design decisions, like which direction should the workers sit. These decisions accumulate. I personally think that capitalism sucks, so technology under capitalism, after a few hundred years, also sucks, since that technology contains within it hundreds of years of capitalist decision-making.