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: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday August 03 2015, @11:05AM
Someone ought to remind the artist that they're the ones who pumped out their dystopian future stuff for many, many decades before any of this technology stuff was ever invented.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MrNemesis on Monday August 03 2015, @03:34PM
I feel inclined to point out that much of the technology in dystopian fiction is identical to the technology in utopian fiction. It seems to be up to the author as to whether the people using or controlling it are good or a shower of bastards. And that has always been the problem that the artists, and humanity at large, has grappled with with any technology.
"To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."