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: 3, Interesting) by C R Johnson on Monday August 03 2015, @10:23AM
What technologists are doing is what make humans different from animals: Creating things by thinking and production.
It takes us further from our animal self's. Away from living in nature and being emotion driven. De-animalizing is more correct.
Most artists I know are emotional basket cases and are always whining about something. That why they are artists.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @01:31PM
Absolutely! If anything, technologists are humanising the world by transforming it in ways that may suit us (for a short period), but are detrimental to other life forms on the planet.