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Tech Doesn’t Make Our Lives Easier. It Makes Them Faster
While we may begin using tools for our collective benefit, we slowly remake our world around the needs of technology, such as building highways and suburbs to support the automobile, or changing school curriculums so that they work on computers. Once we’ve done that for long enough, we eventually find ourselves inside something like a machine—a sel
... See moreDouglas Rushkoff • Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
Indeed, fidelity angst is an engine that drives all manners of digital innovation. Each year, consumers purchase devices with faster processors, higher pixel counts, larger screens, lighter and thinner enclosures, more comfortable keyboards, VR, speech-to-text, and voice activation. Each innovation promises a more ideal form of connection via an im... See more
Mack Hagood • Fidelity Angst — Real Life
This kind of thinking sees the future as defined by universal progress—rather than by a messy, contradictory struggle between different interests and forces—and never driven by the aspirations of those from below. It reduces the value of human agency to entrepreneurialism and empty consumerism.
Lizzie O'Shea • Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us About Digital Technology
As if to rub it in, some anthropologists tell us that thousands of years ago people had much more time available to them than their hunting, gathering and child-rearing required. Three or four hours of work a day paid the bills, so they had a lot of downtime. Then came agriculture, and eventually industrialization, and somehow these helpful develop... See more