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posted by CoolHand on Monday August 03 2015, @05:55AM   Printer-friendly
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.
...
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?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @06:17AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @06:17AM (#217256)

    http://xkcd.com/1227/ [xkcd.com]

    I don't see what people are complaining about. It's not as though I have a red bull IV drip hooked up and will die of caffinnnneeeeee ppooooiisssooonnniiinggg aannnnyy ^$%*ĝ9*9& [ NO CARRIER ]

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @06:49AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @06:49AM (#217264)

    Interesting. Can we find similar quotes from 100 years previous?

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @07:17AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @07:17AM (#217271)

      That was my first thought. Something from 1815 perhaps.

      I do know this and have been passing it around the news aggregators for fifteen years:

      “Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.” - Socrates

      I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint.
      - Hesiod, 700 BC

      Our earth is degenerate in these latter days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.

      - Assyrian tablet, 2800 BC

      We live in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect
      their parents. They are rude and impatient. They frequently
      inhabit taverns and have no self control.
      - Egyptian tomb, 4000 BC

      I have more donated from soylentils, unfortunately I can't seem to find them at the moment. Perhaps someone else will chime in.

      • (Score: 2) by Nuke on Monday August 03 2015, @11:53AM

        by Nuke (3162) on Monday August 03 2015, @11:53AM (#217355)

        I don't see your point. This thread was about art versus tech, not old versus young.

        • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 03 2015, @12:45PM

          by VLM (445) on Monday August 03 2015, @12:45PM (#217375)

          Old always complain about the young's pointless addictions.

          Its no different than complaining about kids watching TV (mine don't, they're all about the youtube). TV used to be described as a vast wasteland because everybody watched a few channels of crap, but now nobody watches hundreds of channels of crap, its all about streaming paid video or streaming ad supported youtube video. I have a perfectly good 10+ year old mythtv system with great HDTV OTA reception and also some cable channels and there's basically nothing to record anymore, or nothing to watch that doesn't have better quality than streaming it for free or a subscription I already have.

          Music industry rock music from the 50s was an instrument of the devil, before than comic books were ruining our children in the 20s/30s... Just old people whining.

          Note that young people are really bad about understanding fads. Even the kids themselves will be laughing about people using facebook soon enough, ha ha people back then were so stupid, but us modern kids would never do anything that dumb like sit around all day clicking like on facebook feeds. Yeah, sure, kids have been saying that kind of stuff for at least a century.

          I don't think the artists have anything to worry about. The person thats clicking like compulsively wasn't sitting in the art museum B.F. (before facebook). They were doing the usual fad BS. The artists aren't losing anything.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Common Joe on Monday August 03 2015, @12:17PM

    by Common Joe (33) <common.joe.0101NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday August 03 2015, @12:17PM (#217365) Journal

    The XKCD link certainly has quite a bit of truth to it, but it misses something fundamental with art created by software: 1) Some files can no longer be open opened [I have some old word processing documents from the DOS days that I can no longer open], 2) Dependencies [Related to #1; Soylent News barely worked when it first started because the old software depended on old hardware and old software], 3) Software controlled by outside entities will one day make your creations go away if you do not save your own copies with your own backups [How long will Devian Art be around?]... and further complicated by reasons I gave in #1 and #2. 4) Insane laws and culture revolving around copyright, DRM, and censorship.

    And these are valid concerns not only for artists but all of us. It's nothing new to most of us here on Soylent News, but based on the responses poo-pooing artists, I thought I should at least bring these points up.

    • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday August 04 2015, @12:04AM

      by mhajicek (51) on Tuesday August 04 2015, @12:04AM (#217654)

      "I have some old word processing documents from the DOS days that I can no longer open"

      Dosbox?

      --
      The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
      • (Score: 2) by Common Joe on Tuesday August 04 2015, @03:58AM

        by Common Joe (33) <common.joe.0101NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday August 04 2015, @03:58AM (#217751) Journal

        I tried that a few years ago, but to no avail. They're PFS Write documents. It requires some funky settings in the autoexec.bat / config.sys to run. I haven't found anything open source that can update the files to something more modern. They include both graphics and text. Perhaps I should try again or I have print outs that I could just scan one day.

        And to complete the anecdotal story, I used this program because, as a student, I felt paying for it was better than pirating the way-too-expensive Word Perfect 5.1. At least in today's world, there are better options. I use LibreOffice whenever I can.

        I recall some program from 20+ years ago that updates whole directories of files from one word processing format to another. I don't know of anything like that today.

        • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday August 06 2015, @12:21AM

          by mhajicek (51) on Thursday August 06 2015, @12:21AM (#218861)

          What era system do you need? Which OS? I have access to an original IBM PC from 1981 and a few things in between.

          --
          The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
          • (Score: 2) by Common Joe on Sunday August 09 2015, @11:04AM

            by Common Joe (33) <common.joe.0101NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Sunday August 09 2015, @11:04AM (#220197) Journal

            I greatly appreciate the offer, but I'll decline. I have print outs so those will do ok. (I just have to get up off my lazy butt and scan them.) PFS Write doesn't have great export options. The most "universal" I could find was printing out to an old laser jet. It was before PDF and it was a competitor to WordPerfect and they chose not to be able to import / export with WordPerfect. (And quite frankly, WordPerfect 5.1 was superior in almost every way except for WYSIWYG which PFS Write did surprisingly well for a DOS program. Of course WordPerfect 5.2 for Windows kicked its butt in that.)

            Quite frankly, I'm surprised you have access to that kind of working technology. That's pretty friggin' awesome.

            I have 5 1/4" floppies, a copy of Windows 3.0 on 3.5" and unused punch cards somewhere. Even brought them with me moving to Europe. I have no idea if the floppies will still work. I once saw 8" floppies and floppy disk drives at a government office I used to work at about 20 years ago collecting dust. The earliest tech I ever used was the TRS-80 (with audio tape deck to save / load data) followed by the Commodore 64. I had to use a desk fan to keep the disk drive cool enough to use. I regret getting rid of both of them.

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by OwMyBrain on Monday August 03 2015, @03:22PM

    by OwMyBrain (5044) on Monday August 03 2015, @03:22PM (#217422)

    When I saw you post an XKCD comic in this article, I though for certain it was going to be this one. [xkcd.com]

    These artists can continue to go on about how technology is dictating people's lives, and I will continue to ignore them. Technology is not forcing people to have their face in their phone all the time or to like everything on facebook. People are doing that themselves. Technology is just a tool. The public decides how to use them. I'm all in favor of critical analysis of our technological lives by artists or whomever, but I think the conclusion they have come to is misplaced.

    From the article, "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." I agree with this statement, but not the article's implication that technologists are creating some sort of authoritarian culture where only they can choose how people interact with the world. People choose to use their smartphones or social media or not, and that says important things about our lives. However, I think these artists are barking up the wrong tree by putting all the blame in Silicon Valley. The question they should be exploring is why is it so easy for people to use technology as a proxy for real life or if this is really such a bad thing. But don't listen to what I say. My degree is in computer science, and I'm really craving a burrito.

    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Monday August 03 2015, @04:29PM

      by frojack (1554) on Monday August 03 2015, @04:29PM (#217453) Journal

      These artists can continue to go on about how technology is dictating people's lives, and I will continue to ignore them.

      You as well as every generation of mankind since the beginning of the species.

      Starving shivering, predator persued people do not create art. Well fed, warm, secure people do.
      Technology always comes first. Art is always an afterthought.

      It's worked this way for eons, long before Maslow [simplypsychology.org] explained it.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.