Automation Nation (Things Get Worse)
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Note: This is the third in my series of answers to Jamais Cascio’s challenge to futurist thinkers, to discuss scenarios about what the world will be like. This one, as the title says, is the one where things get worse.
“There’s a hardware solution to intellectual property theft. It’s called a .357 Magnum.” - K.W. Jeter, “Noir.”
I recently finished reading Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not A Gadget,” a self-described manifesto against what he calls the “cybernetic totalism” of the Internet age, embodied through social media, Wikipedia, and the like. Lanier, a virtual reality innovator, computer scientist, lecturer, and all-around genius, is hardly your typical Internet critic, so I was compelled to give the book a read. It’s a strong polemic for about the first two-thirds, where he decries technologies such as file-sharing for robbing musicians of their livelihood, social networks like Facebook for robbing the Web of its individuality, and Internet culture in general for robbing modern interaction of maturity, reducing us all to anonymous “trolls.”
He tends, like most, to fall apart when it comes to concrete solutions to these issues, preferring instead to wax rhapsodic about everything from cephalopods to using computers to recognize smells, but some of his points rang true for an avowed techno-optimist like me. And it gave me pause to think about some issues that passed my desk recently and why it’s important to pay attention to them.
Read the rest of this entry »
Note: This is the third in my series of answers to Jamais Cascio’s challenge to futurist thinkers, to discuss scenarios about what the world will be like. This one, as the title says, is the one where things get worse.
“There’s a hardware solution to intellectual property theft. It’s called a .357 Magnum.” - K.W. Jeter, “Noir.”
I recently finished reading Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not A Gadget,” a self-described manifesto against what he calls the “cybernetic totalism” of the Internet age, embodied through social media, Wikipedia, and the like. Lanier, a virtual reality innovator, computer scientist, lecturer, and all-around genius, is hardly your typical Internet critic, so I was compelled to give the book a read. It’s a strong polemic for about the first two-thirds, where he decries technologies such as file-sharing for robbing musicians of their livelihood, social networks like Facebook for robbing the Web of its individuality, and Internet culture in general for robbing modern interaction of maturity, reducing us all to anonymous “trolls.”
He tends, like most, to fall apart when it comes to concrete solutions to these issues, preferring instead to wax rhapsodic about everything from cephalopods to using computers to recognize smells, but some of his points rang true for an avowed techno-optimist like me. And it gave me pause to think about some issues that passed my desk recently and why it’s important to pay attention to them.
Read the rest of this entry »