Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @08:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @08:55PM (#217579)

    In your rosy picture, you're overlooking the externalities.
    Think: the nasty air in London for over a century. [google.com]
    For USAians: St. Louis for many decades; L.A. too.

    ...then there's fracking to get cheaper hydrocarbons and the nearby folks who can now ignite what comes out of their water taps--but obviously can't drink that.

    I'm also thinking of the river that was so polluted with industrial waste that it caught fire in 1969.

    Technology -can- improve life but industrialists are often abusive to the local (and now global) ecosystem and the humans who depend on that.

    -- gewg_

  • (Score: 2) by Hartree on Monday August 03 2015, @11:39PM

    by Hartree (195) on Monday August 03 2015, @11:39PM (#217646)

    I'm probably one of the few here who can say they've done laundry in a stream pounding it with a rock (extended field exercise in the Army).

    I am confident that a few times doing so the new of it wears off will make you put the "externalities" in context.

    Besides, getting the effluent put through a modern treatment plant makes what flows downstream a lot better than just untreated stuff flowing down the river.

    Now, if you want to talk about cleaner ways of getting the power like renewables whatnot and sustainability in raw material re-use, that's a good thing. But older methods often have more of those externalities per capita than modern ones.

    "caught fire in 1969"

    The Cuyahoga in Ohio. I remember that one vaguely (I was 7), but it certainly wasn't the only one that did. The Chicago River famously caught fire in 1899.

    My standard example is the air in Gary Indiana being orange when I was there in the late 60s.