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from the bleeding-hearts-and-artists-making-a-stand dept.
Silicon Valley is dictating the way we live through design. From smartphones to dating websites, we increasingly experience the world and basic human connection through platforms and devices Silicon Valley created for us. It is the artist’s job to turn a critical eye on the world we live in. At the Rhizome event, it seemed like the artists were deeply troubled by the ways in which technology is limiting our ability to see that world.
There is the common refrain that everyone’s eyeballs are glued to their smartphones, even while walking into traffic, but this is a deeper concern, that the way we are designing technology is taking away the best parts of our humanity. On Facebook, you must “like” everything. On Vine, things must be interesting in 7 seconds or less. On Google, you must optimize or you will disappear.
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Technologists tend to think about their creations in terms of code and efficiency, whereas artists excel at helping us see the humanity in the machine, pinpointing moments of beauty, ugliness and truth in the way we live. We need artists to help save us from the ‘fitter, happier, more productive’ world that Silicon Valley is creating, a world that doesn’t seem to be making us all as happy as it promised. The Rhizome experiment is just the start of getting technologists to think more deliberately about the world they are making the rest of us live in.
Are technologists dehumanizing the world?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @06:03AM
Yes.
Next question?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @06:32AM
A classic in this vein is Langdon Winner's essay "Do Artifacts Have Politics?".
Copy pasting that name with quotes included into your favourite search engine will produce a copy.
I for one believe we should be quite worried. Machines are controlling the society ever more. If they shut down today, millions would starve to death. We must ascertain that we control the machines, technically and legally. One important building block of this is Free software. https://fsf.org/ [fsf.org] We also need free hardware to run it on.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday August 03 2015, @11:35AM
This is very important. There is another component that is often forgotten--the human practice of using those things. So much of the world goes on as it does because people are afraid of trying new things or making mistakes and breaking stuff and getting laughed at. People who overcome that barrier learn important lessons about how things are made and problems are solved, and much of the time the reaction is, "Huh! I had no idea it was that simple." But the balance of humanity does not overcome that barrier. So it's key to have, along with Open Source and Open Hardware, Open Instruction.
The Internet, with Instructables and DIY wikis and videos, gets us part of the way there. But there's often no substitute for standing next to someone with mastery, performing something with confidence that you would be loathe to attempt for fear of losing a finger.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday August 03 2015, @09:49PM
The problem isn't whether or not we control the machines, but whether or not the machines control us.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday August 03 2015, @11:28PM
The machines control the people, and the ruling class controls the machines. This is the natural order, n'est pas?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @03:19AM
shhh! you'll wake them!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @09:03PM
And I'm proud to call myself a technologist.