All this is partly a language problem. Silicon Valley’s corporations are constantly recruiting us to embrace their goals and their language. Corporate capitalists teach us to be more like them, to value efficiency and profitability and forget about values that might matter more in the end. We lack the language that would let us prize the arduous, the uncomfortable, the slow and wandering, the unpredictable, the vulnerable or risky, the intimate, the embodied.

We resist the tyranny of the quantifiable by finding a language that can value all those subtle phenomena that add up to a life worth living. A language not in the sense of a new vocabulary but attention, description, conversation centred on these subtler phenomena and on principles not corrupted by what corporations want us to want.

...

Resisting the annexation of our hearts and minds by Silicon Valley requires us not just to set boundaries on our engagement with what they offer, but to cherish the alternatives. Joy in ordinary things, in each other, in embodied life, and the language with which to value it, is essential to this resistance, which is resistance to dehumanisation.

no comments (yet)

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
there doesn't seem to be anything here
8 comments in c/technology@lemmy.world view that post
[–] 12 points 9 months ago (4 children)

It is not technology that takes away from us, it is the people behind that decide how they are deployed. Stop moving the blame to the tech, blame the people.

  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] [S] 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Why not both? We can oppose both Gemini and Pichai

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Because technology isn't to blame. Technology doesn't have any agenda or intrinsic capacity for malice...the people behind it do. The people who decide to use the capabilities of technology with malicious intent are to blame, they should be blamed for all of it. Do not let technology share the load of that blame, it is only the people behind that should that, they er personally to blame because they actively chose to use technology maliciously when they could just have chosen not to.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] [S] 2 points 9 months ago* (1 child)

    I don’t know, that just seems too simple. There’s a good argument to be made that technology can embody political values and power relations, apart from its designers. The “guns don’t kill people” line doesn’t hold much water when all the empirical evidence shows that the mere presence of guns makes us less safe, for example. Similarly, it’s not especially important why tech bros do what they do, or if they have good or bad motives, if the things they make hurt people or destroy the biosphere. The purpose of a thing is what it does, regardless of what its maker intended it to do.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    You misunderstand me then...I'm not saying we should not regulate some technologies and what they're allowed to be used for, we absolutely should. But blame should be put solely on the people using it in horrible soul crushing ways. They are terrible people doing terrible things, blame them, punish them.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Do people really measure berries by "gallons"?

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • 1 comment in c/news@lemmy.sdf.org view that post
    [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    @pmjv Adler and Winograd previously described much of what technology is taking from Solnit in a 1992 collected volume using Xerox' priviliged access to its customers internal details.They called e.g. the McDonalds scenario the idiot-proofing fallacy.

  • source