the techno-social environment
It’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters
the techno-social environment
the principles of efficiency and speed and optimization and profitability, recurring themes here of late, increasingly dictate how we act and interact in many if not most of the social spaces we inhabit. Thoughtless automaticity, which demoralizes all parties, becomes our default mode
L. M. Sacasas • Render Unto the Machine
Digital technology is capitalism in hyperdrive, injecting its logic of consumption and promotion, of monetization and efficiency, into every waking minute. - Franzen
We chase numbers and icons because they’re always available, and the chase is often so immersive that it keeps us from seeing where it leads, which is often far away from what we actually want. This can lead to what the evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman calls “counterfeit fitness”: the constant, momentary “wins” that come with playing... See more
Gurwinder • Why Everything Is Becoming a Game
Believing that AI will save time is like being a person in the late 1800s seeing their first car and thinking “oh how easy it’ll be to get to the meadow now!” People back then didn’t imagine that by the 1960s we’d be stuck in traffic jams for hours in mega-cities. Now apply this to AI. If we fast-forward a decade, it will have recalibrated the... See more
Brett Scott • Tech Doesn’t Make Our Lives Easier. It Makes Them Faster
The result is that increasingly capable technologies are going to be a fundamental part of 21st-century life. They mediate a growing number of our deeds, utterances and exchanges. Our access to basic social goods — credit, housing, welfare, educational opportunity, jobs — is increasingly determined by algorithms of hidden design and obscure... See more
Jamie Susskind • Digital Technology Demands A New Political Philosophy | NOEMA
we run into problems precisely when we start treating technology as an end rather than a means to an end. This is not to say that we can’t be legitimately impressed with technical achievements on their own terms, of course, or admire the skill that makes them possible. But we do well to also judge technologies according to the greater ends they... See more
What Is To Be Done? — Fragments
The New Legislators of Silicon Valley - The Ideas Letter
theideasletter.org
The collective perspectives that emerge from social media - our understanding of what the public is and wants - are similarly shaped by algorithms that select on some aspects of the public, while sidelining others. And we tend to orient ourselves towards that understanding, through a mixture of reflective beliefs, conformity with shibboleths, and... See more
Henry Farrell • We're Getting the Social Media Crisis Wrong
