[HN Gopher] Doug Rushkoff Is Ready to Renounce the Digital Revol... ___________________________________________________________________ Doug Rushkoff Is Ready to Renounce the Digital Revolution Author : fortran77 Score : 48 points Date : 2023-05-11 13:12 UTC (9 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.wired.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com) | prepend wrote: | > Some weeks after my visit, Silicon Valley Bank failed and | nearly dragged the global financial system down along with it--a | direct result of the Trump administration's deregulation agenda. | | Really? This seems kind of far afield. How is SVB due to Trump? | photon12 wrote: | There used to be stricter capital requirements and oversight | for regional banks, until: | | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-signs-... | | See also: | | https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/silicon-valley-ban... | CyberDildonics wrote: | This is basically an ad (like everything in wired) for his latest | book talking about the worst aspects of the latest technology. It | says tech billionaires are bad and drops all the usual names even | though there is no new information. | | I'm almost impressed with the amount wired can stretch out vapid | nonsense into an article. There is a photo of the guy sitting in | a bathtub with a laptop for some reason and a photo of him in his | office with a radial zoom filter for some reason. | | It's basically an article about a guy's book that is written | about other news articles. | Syonyk wrote: | No real surprise. A good number of people who have grown up with | the promise of the tech are pretty well disgusted by what it's | turned out to deliver, which is mostly "A handful of | multibillionaires treating the rest of us as sets of eyeballs to | be monetized at all possible costs." | | I'm certainly there. I grew up with the promises of the internet, | and I have to agree with Doctorow about "Enshitification." Most | of the promised stuff has turned out to have some pretty nasty | side effects and consequences. Turns out, humans don't scale to a | global conversation very well, and _especially_ not when your | goal there turns into "ensuring they see as much of the platform | as possible to view your ads." | | That's before getting into the fact that we can't trust computers | in the slightest, because they're too complex for even the people | who make them to reason about, and our software is a hot mess - | but, hey, we have tools to bring in all 2700 un-audited | dependencies for the Electron app! Hey, where'd my crypto wallet | contents go? Huh. Find someone who's done computer security for | long, and they'll either be a weird off grid prepper or be | planning for something of the sort, with nothing more complex | than a microcontroller or two. | | We've tried, for north of a decade, and with a solid couple years | of effort, to build human interaction with various forms of | consumer tech intermediating all the interactions, and it's been | an unmitigated disaster in no shortage of ways (David Sax's book | The Future is Analog is a good survey of the topic). I've been | having good results lately returning to analog human interaction | around a campfire on a regular basis. | | That's before you get into the slave labor, near slave labor, and | "I Can't Believe It's Not Slave Labor" that goes into pretty much | _all_ our modern devices - from the cobalt on up (Cobalt Red by | Kara is a good read here, Dying for an iPhone is relevant, and | there 's no shortage of others). It's nasty, and behind every | promise to do better seems to be some mechanism or another to | further obfuscate the human labor going into the modern short | lived electronics (because, of course, long lived devices are bad | for profit). | | So, yeah. Good for him. The tech thing has rotted. Let's try | something different. | andanotherthing wrote: | I've been following Douglas Rushkoff for about a decade now. He's | written books about this for the last 10-15 years, and his | podcast 'team human'interviews some very interesting people. | | I don't know about this article, but Douglas is as real as they | come. I'm not sure why people here are being cynical. | Apocryphon wrote: | Hasn't this been Jaron Lanier's shtick for years, too? And all he | gets is WIRED articles as well. | hemmert wrote: | It's so good to see this movement gaining momentum. | Animats wrote: | Not really. It's too diffuse. The closest thing we have to a | counterculture is the MAGA movement, and their leader is a | billionaire. No mob is marching up to 3000 Sand Hill Road | yelling "String them up!" | confoundcofound wrote: | The MAGA movement has a strong anti-VC-and-BigTech bent. I | wouldn't be surprised if they do take action. | iamdamian wrote: | Don't most movements start as diffuse changes in sentiment? | cjbgkagh wrote: | I think many appear that way but only due to successful | astroturfing. | iamdamian wrote: | According to The Affluent Society [0], a seminal book | that established the idea of "conventional wisdom", most | movements start with diffuse sentiment changes and then | crystallize into a "changing of the guard" only after | time has allowed a group to recognize that the general | attitude has shifted. | | [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Affluent_Society | aaron695 wrote: | [dead] | mitchbob wrote: | Archived: | https://archive.ph/2023.05.11-115448/https://www.wired.com/s... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-05-11 23:01 UTC)