[HN Gopher] Doug Rushkoff Is Ready to Renounce the Digital Revol...
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Doug Rushkoff Is Ready to Renounce the Digital Revolution
Author : fortran77
Score : 48 points
Date : 2023-05-11 13:12 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| prepend wrote:
| > Some weeks after my visit, Silicon Valley Bank failed and
| nearly dragged the global financial system down along with it--a
| direct result of the Trump administration's deregulation agenda.
|
| Really? This seems kind of far afield. How is SVB due to Trump?
| photon12 wrote:
| There used to be stricter capital requirements and oversight
| for regional banks, until:
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-signs-...
|
| See also:
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/silicon-valley-ban...
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| This is basically an ad (like everything in wired) for his latest
| book talking about the worst aspects of the latest technology. It
| says tech billionaires are bad and drops all the usual names even
| though there is no new information.
|
| I'm almost impressed with the amount wired can stretch out vapid
| nonsense into an article. There is a photo of the guy sitting in
| a bathtub with a laptop for some reason and a photo of him in his
| office with a radial zoom filter for some reason.
|
| It's basically an article about a guy's book that is written
| about other news articles.
| Syonyk wrote:
| No real surprise. A good number of people who have grown up with
| the promise of the tech are pretty well disgusted by what it's
| turned out to deliver, which is mostly "A handful of
| multibillionaires treating the rest of us as sets of eyeballs to
| be monetized at all possible costs."
|
| I'm certainly there. I grew up with the promises of the internet,
| and I have to agree with Doctorow about "Enshitification." Most
| of the promised stuff has turned out to have some pretty nasty
| side effects and consequences. Turns out, humans don't scale to a
| global conversation very well, and _especially_ not when your
| goal there turns into "ensuring they see as much of the platform
| as possible to view your ads."
|
| That's before getting into the fact that we can't trust computers
| in the slightest, because they're too complex for even the people
| who make them to reason about, and our software is a hot mess -
| but, hey, we have tools to bring in all 2700 un-audited
| dependencies for the Electron app! Hey, where'd my crypto wallet
| contents go? Huh. Find someone who's done computer security for
| long, and they'll either be a weird off grid prepper or be
| planning for something of the sort, with nothing more complex
| than a microcontroller or two.
|
| We've tried, for north of a decade, and with a solid couple years
| of effort, to build human interaction with various forms of
| consumer tech intermediating all the interactions, and it's been
| an unmitigated disaster in no shortage of ways (David Sax's book
| The Future is Analog is a good survey of the topic). I've been
| having good results lately returning to analog human interaction
| around a campfire on a regular basis.
|
| That's before you get into the slave labor, near slave labor, and
| "I Can't Believe It's Not Slave Labor" that goes into pretty much
| _all_ our modern devices - from the cobalt on up (Cobalt Red by
| Kara is a good read here, Dying for an iPhone is relevant, and
| there 's no shortage of others). It's nasty, and behind every
| promise to do better seems to be some mechanism or another to
| further obfuscate the human labor going into the modern short
| lived electronics (because, of course, long lived devices are bad
| for profit).
|
| So, yeah. Good for him. The tech thing has rotted. Let's try
| something different.
| andanotherthing wrote:
| I've been following Douglas Rushkoff for about a decade now. He's
| written books about this for the last 10-15 years, and his
| podcast 'team human'interviews some very interesting people.
|
| I don't know about this article, but Douglas is as real as they
| come. I'm not sure why people here are being cynical.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Hasn't this been Jaron Lanier's shtick for years, too? And all he
| gets is WIRED articles as well.
| hemmert wrote:
| It's so good to see this movement gaining momentum.
| Animats wrote:
| Not really. It's too diffuse. The closest thing we have to a
| counterculture is the MAGA movement, and their leader is a
| billionaire. No mob is marching up to 3000 Sand Hill Road
| yelling "String them up!"
| confoundcofound wrote:
| The MAGA movement has a strong anti-VC-and-BigTech bent. I
| wouldn't be surprised if they do take action.
| iamdamian wrote:
| Don't most movements start as diffuse changes in sentiment?
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I think many appear that way but only due to successful
| astroturfing.
| iamdamian wrote:
| According to The Affluent Society [0], a seminal book
| that established the idea of "conventional wisdom", most
| movements start with diffuse sentiment changes and then
| crystallize into a "changing of the guard" only after
| time has allowed a group to recognize that the general
| attitude has shifted.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Affluent_Society
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| mitchbob wrote:
| Archived:
| https://archive.ph/2023.05.11-115448/https://www.wired.com/s...
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