[From article]
Astra Taylor’s iPhone has a cracked screen. She has bandaged it with clear packing tape and plans to use the phone until it disintegrates. She objects to the planned obsolescence of today’s gadgetry, and to the way the big tech companies pressure customers to upgrade.
Taylor, 36, is a documentary filmmaker, musician and political activist. She’s also an emerging star in the world of technology criticism. She’s not paranoid, but she keeps duct tape over the camera lens on her laptop computer — because, as everyone knows, these gadgets can be taken over by nefarious agents of all kinds.
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Political progressives once embraced the utopian promise of the Internet as a democratizing force, but they’ve been dismayed by the rise of the “surveillance state,” and the near-monopolization of digital platforms by huge corporations.
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Techno-skeptics, or whatever you want to call them — “humanists” may be the best term — sense that human needs are getting lost in the tech frenzy, that the priorities have been turned upside down. They sense that there’s too much focus on making sure that new innovations will be good for the machines.
[. . .]
Start the class with “You Are Not a Gadget” (Jaron Lanier), move on to “The Internet Is Not the Answer” (Andrew Keen), and then, to scare the students silly, “Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era” (James Barrat). Somewhere in the mix should be Astra Taylor’s “The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age,” a clear-eyed reappraisal of the Internet and new media.
[. . .]
Our thoughts, friendships and basic urges are processed by computer algorithms and sold to advertisers. The machines may soon know more about us than we know about ourselves.
That information is valuable. A frequent gibe is that on Facebook, we’re not the customers, we’re the merchandise. Or to put it another way: If the service is free, you’re the product.
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There are grave concerns that robots are taking the jobs of humans. And the robot issue leads inevitably to the most apocalyptic fear: that machine intelligence could run away from its human inventors, leaving us enslaved — or worse — by the machines we created.
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Our technology today is so new that we haven’t had time to understand how to use it wisely.
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Washington’s political establishment, however, has largely deferred to Silicon Valley.
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For example, Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story” is a tale of people struggling to find love and humanity in a world of Big Brother-like surveillance, societal breakdown and increasingly coarse social norms. The novel features gadgets that allow people to rate one another numerically on their sexual attractiveness.
[. . .]
Dave Eggers’s novel “The Circle” tells of a rising star at a Google-like company. She excels by answering thousands of e-mails a day, working at a frenetic pace. She lives with a camera around her neck that streams everything she sees onto the Internet.
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[Pope] Francis sketched the dangers, writing that technological development hasn’t been matched by development in human values and conscience.
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The pontiff is saying, with his special authority, what many others are saying these days: Machines are not an end unto themselves. Remember the humans.
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Jaron Lanier. He’s a musician, composer, performer and pioneer of virtual-reality headsets that allow the user to experience computer-generated 3D environments. [. . .] He believes that Silicon Valley treats humans like electrical relays in a vast machine.
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Lanier later wrote two books lamenting the way everyone essentially works for Facebook, Google, etc., by feeding material into those central processors and turning private lives into something corporations can monetize. He’d like to see people compensated for their data in the form of micropayments.
[. . .]
In our society there are two paths to success: One is to be good at computers and the other is to be a sociopath.”
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The same technologies that empower individuals and enable protesters to organize also make it possible for governments to spy on their citizens. What used to be a phone now looks to many people like a tracking device.
Then there’s the question of who’s making money. Progressives are appalled by the mind-boggling profits of the big tech companies.
[. . .]
“Where do humans fit into this new economy?” [Douglas Rushkoff, whose new book is titled “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus,”] said. “Really not as creators of value, but as the content. We are the content. We are the data. We are the media. As you use a smartphone, your smartphone gets smarter, but you get dumber.”
[. . .]
people are participating in that system willingly — if perhaps not entirely aware of what is happening to their data.
Taylor’s smartphone with the cracked screen clearly has been in heavy use. She knows these gadgets are addictive by design — “like Las Vegas slot machines in our pockets.” But she also has trouble living without one.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/classic-apps/techno-skeptics-objection-growing-louder/2015/12/26/e83cf658-617a-11e5-8e9e-dce8a2a2a679_story.html
Techno-skeptics’ objection growing louder
By Joel Achenbach
December 26, 2015 at 5:40 PM
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