Value Beyond Instrumentalization — Letters to a Young Technologist

I see it as there’s sort of a Silicon Valley mentality of seamlessness and efficiency that often feels counterintuitive to the art world, which is more about slowly thinking and exploring. And I think that slowing down and exploring more might actually help technologists get to some of the stuff that they’re trying for anyway.

And since technology is not value neutral, to be a technologist is to be inherently opinionated about how the world ought to be. Each act of creation is a statement about one particular means to an end being the best possible means. As Saffron Huang writes, “[b]ringing something into existence is in fact endorsing that thing itself. As we hurtle al... See more

The insincerity, the rampant performativity, the illusion of urgency, the obsession with constructing futures at the expense of the present – for better or worse, these are all things I associate with being a technologist. And when I speak to my technologist friends, most of them share the same inkling that something is amiss .

Far too many of us g... See more