Doug Rushkoff is ready to renounce the digital revolution
wired.com
wired.com
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.
Apple's value proposition is that fundamentally everything they make plays well with each other, and that investments in one product frequently pay off in other (often future) products. Break that into silos and they're individually less compelling.
That doesn't mean the empires are a good thing.
The Internet was always going to be a cultural amplifier. Those of us who grew up when culture wasn't just about greed, narcissism, and sociopathy assumed it would amplify all those old-fashioned values: intellectual curiosity, informed democracy, and public education.
It actually does that. Up to a point. It's far easier to get accurate information about almost everything than it used to be.
But it's been swamped by narcissistic garbage, automated exploitation and greed, and pathocracy.
That's not really the Internet's fault. It's just amplifying the culture it's a part of. The mistake the idealists (like me) made was underestimating just how toxic and self-destructive that culture is.
In reality, as https://www.cochranelibrary.com/web/cochrane/content?urlTitl... points out
> this review did not assess at the impact of wearing a mask in comparison with not wearing a mask.
Indeed the wording of the review was confusing but still.
True. And accurate information
Wait a sec, I'm pretty old, but totally missed this era before human greed and narcissism. When exactly are we talking about?
I get that it's easier to engage with what one wants someone to have said, rather than what they actually said, but why quote the relevant part just to ignore it? Fiendish!
Make reverse-engineering and emulating official clients legal and suddenly the monopoly problem goes away, because even if Apple only wants their iStuff to work with other iStuff, it will work fine with Android now that it can (legally) reverse-engineer and reimplement the protocol the iStuff uses and pretend to be an iStuff.
"Protocols, not platforms."
You'd need some good old fashioned real world statesmen to make something like that happen.
Be careful what you wish for.
Perhaps as a shopper there is a certain charm to the "mom and pops". Uneven, some good, some bad. Definitely more character
But as a worker, or as a poor consumer, Walmat is better.
The pay is regular. If mom and pop had a bad week, so might you
The hours are regular. Mom and pop work so hard, and their employees are "just like family"
The goods are a reliable price and quality. Walmat gets criticised for selling bad products, but they are reliably bad products, and cheap. You know what you are getting.
I am no cheer leader for capitalism, nor big box retail, but do not get foolishly romantic about the small scale capitalism they have pushed aside.
The problem is not the just the participants, the problem is the system itself.
Cheers!
Maybe I should change the radio out and put in something with an audio input or whatever the norm is to connect old car speakers to an iDevice :)
The thing is if you are consuming that sort of media then you aren't really going to know what is going on in the world.
It's that old dilemma. Don't read the news and you will be uninformed, read the news and you will be misinformed.
Roads too. And water supply? Realistically all things that are natural monopolies seem to do better under democratic governance.
Their reductive view of humans as manipulable minds in a mechanical sack of flesh has led us to nothing but isolation and disconnect.
But the truth is, we are integrated beings integrated in a world we do not and may never fully understand. Tech should thus help us deepen and enrich our sense of embodiment. Instead, it has done the exact opposite.
But the truth is, tech is better when it's not so pretentious. We don't know what will come and planning for that is what we miss.
We should be optimizing for humility, for our limited capacity as techies to forsee & envision. Gibson's maxim to the highest wonder computing could deliver - to what soft wares should be associated with - is "The street finds it's own use for things."
Softness. Humble & open futures. Banking on human spirit. Instead, the tyranny of pre-designed interface, talking down to us forever.
There's also a consistent trend of "We know code, and are as like gods in the synthetic world of 99.95% reliable APIs and networks, therefore we can do anything we want in reality!" Reality, of course, disagrees, often entertainingly.
But these are the mentalities driving a lot of what runs our world, and it's quite frankly terrifying to watch in implementation.
I couldn't agree more with this, it's the most stupid way of looking at living beings possible. As a separate, disconnected piece of "hardware" running "software"
Walk outside without shoes on, in the grass, breathe the air and take a swim in the ocean and you'll soon realize that you might be made of "meat", but you're also made of everything around you and you're part of it, just like everything else.
When people describe themselves or others in that way, they're describing their value in the context of this horrible economic machine we have built and they're trying their best to understand how they fit into this system.
If it comes from a shareholder-driven biz floated on the stock exchange, expect profits over innovation and people. If it's FOSS and driven by problem-solving, passion and grants, you might be in for something nice for a time.
At this point, we seem to be making worse versions of everything with the goal of just having something new and different to show. So few technologies reach the maturity of what came before it as it'll end up replaced before it reaches that point, thus they don't appeal to power users, and most are just figuring out ways to milk the largest market demographic possible.
Sad state of affairs. It doesn't have to be this way.
No, outcomes are everything. Intent is second to that when it comes to society rather than to a case of law.
Instead of empathy and understanding others worldview, they think everyone shares their view and should be happy.
For instance, you bring up how much of it is about ads and how pervasive they are, this exists outside of tech as well. Billboards everywhere, posters on apartments and buses, this is what happens without strict regulations.
Another point you bring up is not trusting computers because of their complexity, but that's everything. We don't trust car engines because we understand them, we instead have regulations in which when things do fuck up (and then inevitably do), creators are punished for them and learn not to do it again. You might say car engines are tech, in which case let's talk food! You trust eating some place not because the chef is some talent blessed by god or your sixth sense, but because the restaurant would have shut down when health inspectors came around.
I don't have to talk about slave labor here, it's obvious.
Rushkoff doesn't even agree with the idea tech is rotted and we should try something different, but rather the primary focus of each innovation should be humans and not money. Which isn't happening currently in a majority of fields, tech is just one of these where it's exacerbated due to how little it's been regulated. Again something Rushkoff brings up in his potential solutions.
As for engines... yeah. We're just going to have to disagree there. I understand engines pretty well, and am familiar with roughly the last 100 years or so of them in various forms. I work on them, can reason about them, and they're generally a fairly simple set of electrical and mechanical systems. I'm not sure what your point about regulations actually is - I don't believe we have reliable engines because of regulations, but because "the companies who figured out how to build reliable engines" rather outsold those who built 100k mile engines. And if you trust health inspectors and restaurants, well, you probably don't know many people in food service. I also don't eat out that often.
What's obvious about slave labor, though? That literally every bit of consumer tech has aspects of that somewhere in the supply chain? I agree! It probably means we shouldn't be using the stuff.
I grew up with the PC and matured with the Internet, being optimistic along most of the journey even when I didn't view some of the outcomes favorably. When I read about the history of computing these days, even the ones that glorify progress, the interpretation is dark. It's not that I view the technology as bad. I have seen the good it can bring and I see the potential for how much more it can improve society. That said, I now believe that the promises were lies. The machines of my childhood, the "computers for masses, not the classes," or the, "bicycles for the mind," lost their luster of computers as the great equalizers once I realized these slogans were enablers for large corporations that were attempting to consolidate control over the industry.
Yes, I realize that interpretation is horrendously unfair. A lot of people at a lot of levels within those corporations probably believed in the social value of what they were delivering. When you look at what they were replacing, such as relatively inexpensive microcomputers for the consumer market replacing expensive computers for the business market, there is some truth to those promises. Yet it is also difficult to see those promises as anything more than ideals exploited by opportunists for their own personal gain. They didn't really care about the outcomes, so the outcomes never ended up reflecting the promises.
> 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.
You've hit on so many issues, recapped well, but the huge blank this article leaves, that Rushkoff's abandonment ask, is what could we hope for?
Right now we are beholden to software. We need to figure out how to make the rawer real experience tractable, interesting, & engaging. Something between coding & systems will emerge that lets us not just be ignorant consumers. We can start to create a hypermedium which enables literacy, not merely enabling spectacle.
And I'll argue that it's really not. And that, yes, we should "gear back down," and stop using nearly as much. I've been on a gradual trip that way over the past half decade or so, and it's pretty darn nice. Tech has been my entire career. I look forward to the day I can put a computer down for the last time.
You're arguing that "something like what a lot of people hoped computers and the internet would become" can still happen, and I think the time window on that has closed. Within a rounding error of "nobody" understands computers deeply anymore - and most who still can keep up with the low level stuff are in their 40s or older, grew up in the ISA era, and generally are looking to retire. An entire generation doesn't know how computers work now, for an awfully wide range of definitions.
But unfortunately, even if you could "give the luddites control of the machines," most of those neoluddites don't want control of the machines. They've tried them for a few decades, and have found an awful lot of it wanting. And if you do insist on asking them, you'll find out that most of them lurk on IRC, and are quite happy with the 80s level of interaction IRC allows. :)
What we have now will not be the way. I suspect the web will probably be the platform that a user-agency enabling computing will come from, but it will come from making pages with entirely different ethos, pages designed not by and for developers to develop on, but pages designed to surface & raise the hypermedium. People love themselves some hypercard, & I don't 100% get it, but that idea of combination visual / programmatic experiences, that notion of making computing more tactile & rooted, I think is what has to happen. Data and declarative systems are such shit now, nothing affords us our data, it's all burried deep inside code, and the hypercard world, the web/dom world is about an inversion, a juncture where the abstract code falls below the surface of a more general information platform of which code is just a part.
There's no timeline here. There's no past due, time's ran out. Iteration, and back & forth can keep happening. The frontier isn't defined & circumscribed by the mainstream, by the popular. Good ideas have plenty of opportunity to take root & grow. If anything, I think the desperation & starvation society knows it's undergoing emphasizes how rapidly better could take hold.
A machine that helped people create rather than just consume, even simple things like having an inbuilt dictionary. We still have that but it is always running off to the internet to do what was done in 1987. And that leap to something external is not just for convenience, it is a leap of how we used these things.
Like Rushoff, for the last 15 years I have been trying to figure out ways to return a little of that of that isolated but functional style to computing. I no longer try. Every attempt has just been meet with further disappointment. Unlike others here advocating for pushing through, I don't think we can. In pushing through it is merely providing more fuel for potential missuse.
I still use modern technology but only that which is basically forced on me by the rest of society. Even then its impact is minimized - I think Hacker news is the last regular thing I really engage with in this space and that is slowing down with time as well.
Maybe there is a part where spectacle is the main driving force that allowed these technologies to become so pervasive in our world? That is to say that if we never went down this path computers would be treated more like we treated type writers. A neat tool but something few would get obsessed with.
But damage & harm is real, and it makes a powerful headline.
I really believe things would look different if we weren't all to at ends. If we could actually see & experience tech in a modestly reasonable, user-controlled way, if we could see the overlays of weights & pressures that make up our current upvote/downvote algorithm & tune it ourselves... if we had some post-consumer avenues for exploration we were walking, I think we could see society improve itself & make gains. Right now that's unimaginable. The harm & the bad is the only thing we can grasp. In part because computing is kept all in the cloud, in big data keeps, far off & remote, with us here as powerless agents simply receiving whatever signals it deigns beam at us.
Society, if given a chance to do so, would regulate & improve this world. But society's input has not been welcome. Computing has been getting less & less democratic, less and less part of the natural observable world, and more cloistered, closed & shitty, for decades. We cannot even imagine a progressive outlook, where we might participate, and it's hard to guess what things would be like, if we could.
In that sense technology is becoming a feed back loop of society itself. Anxiety, can be an act of repeating the same nervous though again and again in a loop never moving on. In that way, this is were information technology had lead a lot of realms of us to.
To some degree I think this is what Jaron Lanier means when he says AI could drive us insane. This level of feed back is not going to work out well.
I had a discussion recently with somebody about how it feels as though the 70s, 80s, 90s had a distinctive style but from the early 00s onwards there appears to be no distinguishing character to the recent most decades.
Their conclusion was that it was due to 'the increase in technology use, less creativity - more sat about consuming media in one way or another'.
I wonder if that's true - we no longer have to suffer silence or boredom thanks to an endless stream of 'content' available to us.
It prevents rumination and leads us to have every thought impressed upon it variations of patterns from the past.
It became clear to me then that we are the slave class.. The rulers will have us use technology the way they would want us to - for their benefit, not ours.
Nobody needs to use Intel ME to spy on or control people when people willingly install malware such as social media apps, give them all their data and their network effects force others to do the same.
Intel ME/etc is the least of my worries when it comes to computing freedom.
People have this lazy idea of the word "capitalism," which they consider to be "our not-communist system".
Capitalism is the use and espousal of Capital.
Money is not Capital; money is a representation of labour done and value created.
Capital is when you take money and frankenstein it into acting like a magic vegetable/seed which you can plant in its current form and harvest in the same form and then plant some more of in that same form and then harvest more in the same form and it never changes, just magically grows through the mystical power of what Economists call "externalities".
Externalities are mysteries forces that we don't really understand, but which provide us with resources to use, and according to our model, no harm is ever done.
We need to start treating money like money. Capitalism needs to be snuffed out. Work, business, trade, all that can (indeed, must!) go on, but Capital must end.
edit: but give everyone free internet and some server space as a starting point, and let them speak. EVERYONE. If anyone's government thinks they shouldn't have this, fight their government until they give it to them.
If you work eight hours a week, you get shares. No negotiations, labour is entitled to the value it creates. The trust fund scumbag who just uses money like a sponge to suck up more money is not.
edit: I'm on drugs
edit 2: In case my employer is trolling my history for signs of moral degeneracy, it's a holiday, piss off.
edit 3: I was gonna come back and make the second 8 into a 40 also, but fuck that. 8 hours a week, you get shares. Send the trust fund babies to me, I'll explain the reality of work to them. I used to drive a dump truck, it's lots of fun.
Postman's 6 questions about technology:
1. “What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?”
2. “Whose problem is it?”
3. “Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution?”
4. “What new problems might be created because we have solved this problem?”
5. “What sort of people and institutions might acquire special economic and political power because of technological change?”
6. “What changes in language are being enforced by new technologies, and what is being gained and lost by such changes?”
Also:
Neil Postman on Technopoly (1992) and Collapse of Civilization
Are we reducing or increasing suffering?
The problem is that we're not, collectively, any good at actually asking any questions before deciding some new bit of technological wizardry is worth using. We don't consider the opportunity cost (that's a lost concept these days), and the running question seems to be nothing beyond "Can I imagine some possible way in which I might find this useful?" If it turns out not to be, well, we're already in the system, and sunk cost fallacy applies hard.
But, yes. Read Postman. He's very insightful.
At the same time, Malcolm Harris' able writing inevitably reminds the reader of the myriad changes to WiReD magazine over the same period -- from the premier forum for techno-evangelists of every stripe, to whatever its become 30 years hence, a mostly harmless mainstream media outlet that, every so often, shows a little spark of revisiting its former glory.
As a long time subscriber, thanks for the memories, Malcolm.
""" So what answers does Rushkoff offer? His programmatic conclusions in Survival are surprisingly conventional: “Buy local, engage in mutual aid, and support cooperatives. Use monopoly law to break up anticompetitive behemoths, environmental regulation to limit waste, and organized labor to promote the rights of gig workers. Reverse tax policy so that those receiving passive capital gains on their wealth pay higher rates than those actively working for their income.”
"""
Cooption is not unique to that movement. Others (some on the left) have been coopted as well.
Some of it is driven by grift (gold coins, prepper supplies, assault weapons...) Some by political opportunism. Some by nihilistic accelerationism.
Absolutely none of it is a genuinely organic spontaneous bottom-up movement.
That turns out to be one of the worst things about the Internet. It just doesn't amplify culture. Bad actors with significant resources can use it to steer culture.
Any billionaire can seed a political movement now, and significantly influence elections.
That's a ridiculous amount of power and it has absolutely no democratic oversight.
To an extent that's always been true of media ownership. But where early 20th c. print was very much print-and-hope, with the Internet you can get almost instant real-time feedback of how an influence campaign is doing. And if it's not working you can adjust it to order.
At some point soon this whole process will fully automated, with AI running bot farms, creating content, supervising and steering forums, and collecting and personalising prospect details, all without human participation.
I grew up in MAGA-land. The MAGA people I know are mainly driven but what they see on TV and hear on the radio rather than any real experiences. I don't think you can call it 'grassroots' when there is a coherent right-wing strategy to radicalize a demographic
I don't think most conservatives could even begin to talk about public policy on a meaningful level.
Thank you for the real world demonstration of another contributing factor. Treating those who don't share your viewpoint with contempt is not likely to promote unity.
We can disagree on trade policy and still have respect for one another. When people have the same fundamental values they can disagree on lots of things.
We're past the point where we need to 'promote unity'. Anyone freedom loving American needs to fight to protect their ability to live in peace.
This whole idea that it's OK to hate people because because they hold some particular belief leads nowhere good. And in particular, the claim that it's OK to hate them because you perceive them to be hateful is so fundamentally hypocritical it would be comical if it weren't so counterproductive.
All conservatives are right-wing extremists at this point.
> You mention them wanting to enforce their ideology on others, but I'd wager they feel the same thing is being done successfully to them
Yes, because they are extremely ignorant and cannot understand that losing their ability to oppress others is not, in itself oppression.
>You advocate to "fight to protect [your] ability to live in peace." If that doesn't involve finding common ground, then what exactly does it mean?
For me it means fixing our electoral system so that a violent tyrannical minority can't impose their violent ideology on the moral majority of Americans.
>This whole idea that it's OK to hate people because because they hold some particular belief leads nowhere good.
Bruh, these people want to make it illegal for me to exist. This 'we need to understand rural white grievance' nonsense is so played out.
> And in particular, the claim that it's OK to hate them because you perceive them to be hateful is so fundamentally hypocritical it would be comical if it weren't so counterproductive.
I don't perceive them to be hateful, they are hateful violent people. This dumb paradox of tolerance stuff you are pushing is very freshman year of college.
That is tragic, if true.
It is not true, here, thousands of miles, and across an ocean, away (-45.75, 170.57)
Counter-cultures pumping here
But, one can believe that and also viciously reject swathes of the dehumanizing people-are-data-KPIs-and-eyeballs-to-be-monetized surveillance world of algorithmic controls, non-human interfaces and other grotesque idiocies perpetuated by modern tech megacorps and their mini techcorp lead followers. Not to even speak of governments taking on the same attitudes. This second aspect of the digital revolution is certainly grotesque and very dangerous.
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.
https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/24/internet-...
I got them to publish my piece for example:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c...
But not the solutions! Those we have to publish ourselves:
https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v13/
There is nothing wrong with paid, proprietary software. We've had proprietary software all the time but it's only in the last decade, since the rise of the spyware industry, "attention economy" and social media that computing became the shit-show it currently is. That is the root cause of our current problem, not proprietary software itself.
Proprietary software is fine as long as it plays fair or is kept in check with things like adversarial interoperability being made legal.
What I’m getting at is, regardless of how you feel about software and communications ruining society, it doesn’t matter if enough people like it. It is un-outlawable. See the state’s inability to really accomplish banning anything that humans desire - from the drug war to immigration restrictions. Even maximum security prisons are full of contraband. The state can’t do anything if the popular will overwhelmingly disagrees.
The internet gave us advertising free direct peer-to-peer communications in text, video and audio and then took it all away again.
Digital tech is unlike any tech before. It is general purpose, malleable, reprogrammable, with active IO and feedback loops with the human realm. It does have some "genes" and biases in the form of chip design and specialization, but this pales compared to the phenotype diversity of everything that can "run" on it.
The worldwide surface of silicon chips creates thus a blank slate that captures and reflects like a mirror an ever increasing slice of our condition. If the digital image is going dark its because our societies are currently regressing.
The accelerating dehumanising journey of digital tech is a direct reflection of long lived, pre-existing latent beliefs that deny people of essential human dimensions: agency, social bonds, inner spaces and spirituality, harmonious coexistence with nature.
Reclaiming this digital exo-brain (that is cabable for the worst and the best) by the forces of the broader humanistic movement is the prime objective.
Humanity's journey towards ubuntu is long and tortured. Ripping hearts of captives to please imaginary gods in public spectacles was yesterday.
The debilitating thought is that we are past redemption. That the emergent behavior from shapping the mirror of social media platforms and surveillance devices has pulled us into a twilight zone with no escape.
My gut feeling is that it is not yet so dire. It may get there in the mid-term future. What we need to do is make humanism viral. It exists not because of some idealists but because its inate and congruent with what people want. It needs to get reflected in the digital mirror. It already does at the edges. As open source software. As collaboration platforms like wikipedia and openstreetmaps. As the fediverse.
Lets hope and work towards moving it to the center.
Really, because....
> The biggest problems today of tech is that the big corporations are doing regulatory capture and rent-seeking
That is a left wing analysis. These days. I understand that there is a dry economic analysis, usually associated with the right, that criticises regulatory capture and rent-seeking, but it is not part of the current, dominant, right wing analysis.
These days being anti "regulatory capture and rent-seeking" is a left wing position. The position Doctorow takes
Really? This seems kind of far afield. How is SVB due to Trump?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-signs-...
See also:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/silicon-valley-ban...
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.