#pain and suffering. completely unnecesary.

[thecherrygod]

i think that if someone was to say "it feels as if noises are gonna murder me today" you wouldnt ask them to do something like sharpen a knife, and yet.

[liew0138]

On Tech Criticism

Ok, so over the holidays I went through a lot of articles to further beef up my research and ended up with loose sheets of paper on interesting findings, or quotes and ideas that further back up the project's direction. Then I stumbled upon this article, and I think it helped me bring a lot of clarity to the approach I'm seeking. It's not an easy article to go through at all, and so I decided to annotate it on my second reading of this. Instead of just scanning the physical copy I printed where I have all my annotations scribbled on already, I decided to redo my annotations in a pdf format (why....) and here it is, neatly embeded and all!

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KEY SUMMARY POINTS

As a tech critic, what would you consider a true marker of success? Surely it is not an absolute disavowal of technology (that’s both foolish and unrealistic)

Contemporary critics seek to defend humanistic values from the assault of technology, but the biggest flaw lies in their failure to answer the “ok, then what?” question.

Example of Nicholas Carr who framed his critique around automation, his basic premise being that a little bit of technology and automation can go a long way in enabling human emancipation but, once used excessively, they might result in “an erosion of skills, a dulling of perceptions, and a slowing of reactions.” The whole argument is limited to the discussion of choice between a self-driving car and a normal car. About the cognitive and emotional costs of automating the existing system VS leaving it as it is. But the real issue at hand is about transportation, which he has missed in favour of something as narrow (irrelevant) as technology. The author is saying that the criticism should be framed with an understanding of the political struggles and social criticism surrounding the issue at hand.

The author’s opinion on technological critique is that it should serve us all and be realistic and productive – to allow for real, tangible changes to be made and felt. If you keep driving at the point that technology makes us more confused, lazy and more dumbed down, it does not mean that consumers will one day wake up with a newfound drive to renounce their love for automation(/tech) and demand something else from the technology companies.

The current climate of the world: corporatization and technology have become so deeply intertwined; productivity has shot up so much – as a result of tech – that workers are expected to keep up with such growing demands for efficiency as well. This means that to survive, the working class has become completely trapped by the staggering demands of their jobs. In turn, technology has developed to help us adapt to these demands – smart apps and devices for watching children, for cooking, for navigation, etc. 

The author expresses (albeit indirectly) what tech criticism should strive for: “Placed under the right theoretical lens, even mundane objects could help illuminate the contemporary condition.” Tech critics can help open up the discussion of a “much broader matrix of social, cultural, and economic relations/issues” but they don’t because that falls too far out of their realm of expertise – technology.

Therefore, technology should never be looked at as a problem in isolation, as it usually reveals "the contemporary condition" which is what we really want to address.

*MY TAKEAWAY*

It took me three analysis sessions to realize that this article goes far beyond the intention of my project.

Evgeny Morozov's opinions are framed such that if the technological critique's role is to serve people, or in other words, for the public's good, then there is a need to understand that technology serves to amplify the very complicated social/political/economical issues at play and that technology is never the problem, or at least, never the final problem.

On the other hand, my project, as I've established earlier, deals with a much more personal realm. It seeks to beg the larger question: does the role that dissatisfaction play in our lives always have to be viewed as an unnecesary discomfort or evil? (It is therefore not immediately concerned with asking how then, at a consumer level, should we approach technology, and if that act of questioning is even productive or possible or not. Not to say that it is not an important issue to consider, but as E.M as pointed out, all these involve far more complex soc-pol-eco relationships that are beyond the scope of my research at this point.) However, this article has been useful in helping me frame my understanding of technological developments, and that I should be mindful so that I don't cross into the territory of getting carried away with attacking technological advancements by pointing out the cognitive and emotional costs that come into play because of the discovery. That's just really going off topic!!!

Instead, the focus is on how it will not be wise to hew to our hopes that these technological advancements will deliver us from the pain and suffering of the world, because they will not. From a more philosophical point of view, it is because all these suffering makes us more human. And from the article, as I've learned, it is because we are human that we spun such a complicated web of blurred boundaries, dirty politics, conflicting interests and general grey-areaness that will take a long time to untangle (if ever at all) – and attacking technology alone is surely not the wisest way to go about it.