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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: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Monday August 03 2015, @01:46PM

    by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Monday August 03 2015, @01:46PM (#217393) Journal

    Are technologists dehumanizing the world?

    Nope. That doesn't even make sense. Hope the artists have better luck telling the masses to stop using Facebook and Vine (WTF is Vine?) and stop putting blind faith in the Oracle at Google when finding vendors and making purchasing decisions. (For that matter, avoid Oracle at all costs!) Humans choose to do these things. Humans choose to purchase iBling because they need their status symbols.

    A little more about the Google situation: this is what we observe when there are a million vendors all providing the same service. Let us get the blessing of Priests of the Temple of SEO, in order to make an offering to the Oracle at Google, so that the great computers will rank our business first!

    Face it, artists. Humans are conformists. I must not be a technologist, nor must anyone else who believes in free software. From what I can tell most of us here—I know the thought will disturb some greatly—have more in common with the artists than these “technologists.”

    Humanity willingly plugs itself into the Matrix because Facebook is “cool” and iPhones are hip and Google is “easy to use.” Do any of these (dare I use the term?) sheep care at all about what Facebook is doing with their data? Do they care about what the possibilities might be with a supercomputer in their pocket? Ah, but there's the rub! Everybody has a supercomputer in their pocket these days, helpfully DRMed and locked down so that we can only run what's been blessed by the Gods of Mt. Cupertino and the Oracle at Google. Willingly enslaved they are!

    So, say sorry, I don't think there's much to be done, not when the average person struggles with how to compute an average and is hopeless at determining whether the mean is more appropriate than the median given the data they're analyzing and what they're trying to determine. Yes, we can all wish for a world light-years away, through astral nights and cosmic days, where the gifted man is valued over mediocrity.

    Nope, say sorry. We live in a world where yap-yap-yap duckspeaking masses value the Kardashians, the intrigue of Caitlyn Jenner, and iBling. After all, you don't want to be some icky nerd do you? I'll tell you, I'm not sure about those artists and free software hippies. They must be communists! Put 'em up against the wall!

    (Apologies to Rush et al!)

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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday August 03 2015, @03:47PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Monday August 03 2015, @03:47PM (#217431) Journal

    Nope, say sorry. We live in a world where yap-yap-yap duckspeaking masses value the Kardashians, the intrigue of Caitlyn Jenner, and iBling.

    Should we let those people limit what humanity can do? If we do, we can freeze all scientific activity because what we have now is good enough.

    Or, maybe we can recognize that inspiration and ability are not evenly distributed across human populations, and if those who have more of those qualities cease because most people have less of those qualities, then everyone loses, permanently.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Monday August 03 2015, @11:17PM

      by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Monday August 03 2015, @11:17PM (#217636) Journal

      More seriously, I suppose it's a problem of visibility. Never before has the common man been able to get up on Twitter, Facebook, or to a lesser degree YouTube and make the entire world aware of his ignorance or perhaps “vulgarity” (to use an archaic sense of the word). Therefore, it seems that technologists are the architects of the “vast wasteland,” if I may apply that term to the interweb(s).

      The problem for me at least is that I don't see a way to avoid it, not without some intervention from some authority or another. Then, who decides who the authority is and what the message is?

      Reading TFA, I see two themes emerge: the idea that algorithms, especially with machine vision, fail to capture artistic merit or rather attempt to bring it to a few bland data points that are sometimes correct and sometimes hilariously wrong; and a critique of the Silicon Valley startup churn.

      On the first theme, I guess I don't see that as much of a problem. As others above have intimated, if somebody is trusting an algorithm to judge artistic merit or to choose Mr. Right infallibly, they're doing it wrong.

      On the second theme, I'm not certain what that has to do with technology. It more speaks to failings of humans who may lie or who may be gullible, and moreover, it speaks to the desperate search for the next Google, Facebook, or whatever goose that lays golden eggs.

      Perhaps the aversion to “vulgarity” that drove many of us from the old site is the natural answer to the quandary of preventing those “gifted men” from being bogged down by the masses. On the other hand, that does not help achieve what we seem to be striving for: are we asking for “gifted men” to apply their gifts in order to alleviate the vulgar condition of the masses?

      Well, I may be overlooking a third theme, which is the power of propaganda. However, another name for propaganda is advertising. Brand recognition. That's a quagmire I don't think we'll find a way out of until the post-scarcity singularity comes. Companies and governments naturally want to find an axis of narratives that not only promotes their own image, but justifies an entire sociopolitical system that lets the Masters of the Universe, as it were, be the Masters of the Universe. There will probably always be Masters of the Universe, but under post-scarcity, we can just ignore them. I'll just head out into the garage and 3d print and robo-assemble my 2016 Corvette. Until that's true, I have to play along with the Masters of the Universe in desperate hope that maybe I'll obtain a position that will let me buy a 2016 Corvette.

      (Although, truth be told, I'm sure I'm on more than enough lists I'll never have to worry about being in a position that would provide me with status symbols like that.)

      The root problem is that in order to get a job that pays that much with my talents, I'd find myself applying technology in an opposite fashion than TFA would wish I would. Maybe I'll become a quant on Wall Street or get hired by Facebook or Google to improve their data mining and enhance the quality of what they report to the NSA. Maybe I'll solve the machine vision problem (unlikely), but it won't be used to compare Renoir to Rembrandt and identify the different techniques in use! (Otoh, maybe my graphic designer friend would be less irked every time I use the terms constructivist or avant garde incorrectly if I had an advanced algorithm to consult first!)