Nothing to lose but their personal data siphons
May 3, 2018 5:43 AM   Subscribe

Why Silicon Valley can’t fix itself, by Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel, Guardian.
Tech humanism fails to address the root cause of the tech backlash: the fact that a small handful of corporations own our digital lives and strip-mine them for profit. This is a fundamentally political and collective issue. But by framing the problem in terms of health and humanity, and the solution in terms of design, the tech humanists personalise and depoliticise it.

If being technological is a feature of being human, then the power to shape how we live with technology should be a fundamental human right.
Disrupt the disruption.

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posted by runcifex (1 comment total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
Man, I wish that was a smidge shorter and more focused on the final couple of bullet points. It's far more interesting to me to think about extending the EU's GDPR to the rest of the world (what someone, I think Jessamyn, called on Twitter "I'll have what Europe's having, thanks") and other ways in which we can work with the changes that technology brings us than it is to contemplate for the hundredth time the ways in which people are railing against Facebook's evil.

Also, in short, the effort to humanise computing produced the very situation that the tech humanists now consider dehumanising is an intriguing thing to contemplate. I'm not used to thinking of Steve Jobs as a humanizing tech guy!
posted by librarylis at 7:01 PM on May 4, 2018 [1 favorite]


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