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 Common Joe on Monday August 03 2015, @12:17PM
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
"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
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
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
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.