attack surface
(2020) by cory doctorow
(adding page w/o reading it.. just adding his interviews about it et al)
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3rd of little brother.. relationships to tech.. attack surface is really intended for adults
addressed to techs today.. to reach people before they get to where they look back and regret..
on making dent in world thru people realizing relationship to tech.. what it could be
tech as it could be ness
to undo our hierarchical listening et al
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oct 2020 – Cory Doctorow: ‘Technologists have failed to listen to non-technologists’ – The tech activist on his new sci-fi novel and why we mustn’t treat the moral downsides of social media as a necessary evil – https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/oct/10/cory-doctorow-technologists-have-failed-to-listen-to-non-technologists
Across the tech sector, there are a bunch of workers who are waking up and going: “How did I end up rationalising my love for technology and all the power it gives me to take away that power from other people?”
people telling other people what to do ness
“As a society, we have a great fallacy, the fallacy of the ledger, which is that if you do some bad things, and then you do some good things, you can talk them up. And if your balance is positive, then you’re a good person. And if the balance is negative, you’re a bad person. But no amount of goodness cancels out the badness, they coexist – the people you hurt will still be hurt, irrespective of the other things you do to make amends. We’re flawed vessels, and we need a better moral discourse. That’s one of the things this book is trying to establish.”
beyond measuring things for sure
If they ever do bury me, as opposed to scattering my ashes in the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, I want my tombstone to read: “This will all be so great if we don’t screw it up.” And I think that’s the core message of the so-called cyber utopian project – people don’t start organisations such as the Open Rights Group or Electronic Frontier Foundation because they’re sanguine about the future of technology. You have to be very excited about it, and on the other hand, be very fearful of how it could go wrong.
not even how it could go wrong.. but how it could go just good enough.. to keep perpetuating not-us ness..
mufleh humanity law: we have seen advances in every aspect of our lives except our humanity– Luma Mufleh
The brilliant critic Maria Farrell calls them the “prodigal tech bros”. And she says that the real problem in terms of the prodigal son narrative is that the prodigal son is redeemed because he really suffers. However the suffering these sort of prodigal sons have experienced is just feeling sad.
Technologists have failed to listen to non-technologists. In technological circles, there’s a quantitative fallacy that if you can’t do maths on it, you can just ignore it. And so you just incinerate the qualitative elements and do maths on the dubious quantitative residue that remains.
what we need most is a means to undo all hierarchical listening
One of the problems with The Social Dilemma is that it supposes that tech did what it claims it did – that these are actually such incredible geniuses that they figured out how to use machine learning to control minds. And that’s the problem – the mind control thing they designed to sell you fidget spinners got hijacked to make your uncle racist. But there’s another possibility, which is that their claims are rubbish. They just overpromised in their sales material, and that what actually happened with that growth of monopolies and corruption in the public sphere made people cynical, angry, bitter and violent. In which case the problem isn’t that their tools were misused. The problem is that the structures in which those tools were developed are intrinsically corrupt and corrupting.
begs an infrastructure that would guard against that.. everyday
You seem to be leaning towards that latter theory…
Yeah, I just published a short book on this called How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, that was bullish on the idea that surveillance itself is bad, commercial surveillance is bad and that we are living in a moment of great political terror. But it also looks critically on the evidence for mind control, and explores more parsimonious explanations for why people believe outlandish things, like for instance that, for the first time in history, someone who claims to have mind control is not a charlatan.
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be you. 