Discussion
From Cyberselfish by Paulina Borsook. It's going to be a hell of a read, i suspect
"The belief systems I ran into were confusing, for this passionate libertarian population has for the most part only experienced good things, and not bad, from government. And they were disturbing, for beneath them I sensed nastiness, narcissism, and lack of human warmth, qualities that surely don't need to be hardwired into the fields of computing and communications."
"Instead, in high tech, political libertarianism takes the shape of a convenient obliviousness to the value of social contract and governance, however imperfectly and stupidly enacted."
"It's an inability to reconcile the demands of being individual with the demands of participating in society, which coincides beautifully with a preference for, and glorification of, being the solo commander of one's computer in lieu of any other economically viable behavior.
Computers are so much more rule-based, controllable, fix-
able, and comprehensible than any human will ever be."
"It's hard to see what adaptation or evolution functions here: Although you might develop new ways to better teach first-generation immigrants about prenatal care, the need to teach prenatal care, and the substance of it, will not suddenly evolve into something else"
"It's rather like the picture you'd have of the wondrously efficient meritocracy of the music biz if all the musicians you knew...were the sort of player who got featured at Tanglewood or were asked to sit in on sessions with Brian Eno. Everyone would seem to be doing well, and some stupendously so; you simply wouldn't see or know the equally talented but obscure/unlucky musicians who had to consider themselves lucky if they had ...gigs playing in the cocktail lounges of airport Holiday Inns."
"[It] evokes a question I had as I watched the hostile-takeover world of the 198os: Why is it not okay for a company that's doing fine by its customers, employees, community, and stockholders simply to be left alone? So what if it merely performs well but not optimally?"
@bomkatt
Thank you for you thread
And for making me aware that the new edition of Cyberselfish was released 🙏🏻
Ordered 😁
@realn2s i can't decide if knowing about & reading it earlier would have been useful or frustrating.
Useful, because she's very accurate about things, but also frustrating because it isn't stopping anyone
@bomkatt
I can feel you. It is so astonishing and frightening the people saw all of this coming 30+ years ago.
Another book of this kind is The Real World of Technology by Ursula M. Franklin from 1989 😬
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