Washington Post story on end of our faith in technology. Even Jeff Bezos' paper can't help itself from writing about hell that social media, surveillance capitalism and I'd add unilateral programming that is killing our communities.
(I'm not on social media other than youtube videos. And I can tell you I have my mind back much more. I also set my phone on grayscale to make it less appealing -- it works!
The tech metaphors I think of are in phases:
First phase is the Jedi knights atmosphere Steve Jobs sold us on with his 1990's "Think Different" campaigns with photos of Gandhi, King Jr., Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, other iconoclasts of modern media. Say, through 2008 Peak Obama.
The second phase is all Tolkein: the humans buying the dream have turned into hobbits trying to get the ring (technology) back into the fires of Mordor.
It isn't clear Frodo is going to make it, now that AI can copy his voice and send messages to Gandalf radioing to send money only for Gandalf to find out he's been duped, lied to, trust broken and might get himself killed.
I'd like to see a story on the untold story of computers as women's work, and the misogyny that men used in the 1960's to stop women from running most of the computing, as they did up through the 1950's.
Technologists today have evolved an ideology that is driven by mostly white men who are nerds, and they are only too happy to see everyone addicted to screens, not looking up to make eye contact.
I'm not convinced that is the pathless path to liberation and enlightenment.
How about you?
Another question: why is the media silent on the opaque nature of surveillance technologies capturing all kinds of information about us citizens largely without our understanding of the impact our digital biography has to control and commodify us.
Why do you think it has taken 40 years to insist on some transparency and data dignity?
I'm not even sure data dignity is anything more than a PR phrase, but I'd like to order some and find out.
Next up, take something from my backpacking and insist on leave no trace internet use.
If my data is a commodity, I want to get a cut.
Free internet, pay me for my time online.
Some kind of basic income to live in a society with low trust networks like the internet addicting my attention.
Timothy Colman, publisher
Good Nature Publishing
Seattle
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