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Comment by hlandau | Hacker News Reader

Prisons are a technology as I define it, as is writing, agriculture, etc.

I disagree that prisons are a technology, as that doesn't fit the term.

However, even if we were to consider prisons a technology, there are good applications and bad applications. Prisons may be used to keep violent predators away from the civil society they might harm. Prisons may also be used as a deterrent against crime, also beneficial to a civil society. That prisons are used as profit centers by corporations who also have regulatory capture is an evil of the people running those corporations and the corrupt officials who look the other way in order to line their pockets. But neither the good, nor the evil has anything to do with concrete, steel, monitoring systems, and plumbing of a prison.

Humans are good or evil, or sometimes a complicated mixture of both. Shifting the animus to the inanimate shifts the responsibility, and I doubt even clear-thinking religious people would be on-board with that. (I'm not, and I'm religious.)

Action, intent, and agency are human things. Ascribing those things to technology hearkens back to animism not rationalism. The spirit of the river made it jump its banks and flood because the river had an ill temper. The computer was ruthless when it calculated the pay of Bob. That's not how our universe works.

I agree with the premise of "machine-assisted ruthlessness." I simply disagree with the notion that the ruthlessness or oppressiveness is inherent to the tech.

I would absolutely consider prisons a technology, most obviously because we can see human societies where prisons are not a viable technology. If a member of a more primitive tribe starts killing people, the pragmatic solution is to kill them, not incarcerate them. Incarceration imposes technological (e.g. can you build buildings strong enough to hold people involuntarily?) prerequisites and high or extremely high logistical costs (see the cost of housing a prisoner for a year in the UK). You ultimately also need guards and the spare labour in society to be able to allocate to that task instead of potentially more important tasks, like obtaining food. Whether that is feasible will in turn be determined by human productivity in the various fields of production, in the case of food which is determined by the availability of agricultural technology (50% of the UK workforce used to be working on agriculture, now only about 2% to my recollection). Incarceration on the scale we see today is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Obviously such technology can be good or bad.

In my view the IT community falls into the trap of a narrow definition of the term, which now has been supplanted by an even narrower definition where technology just means "IT".

See the other thread above for my thoughts on the latter part. The adoption of a technology is done by the decision of a human. Nobody's claiming that computers have imposed themselves on society...

> Obviously such technology can be good or bad.

I don't think I'm presenting an "IT perspective" as it actually broadens the notion of what technology is to include products and applications. My objections to this conclusion are philosophical not stylistic.

All "technology" (using the broad definition) is a manifestation of human ideas and the evolution of those ideas over time. Human thought preceded the creation of prisons or the repurposing of existing structures as prisons. And even the idea of a "prison" has to be collapsed into a broader category of "secure building", which is a technology that emerged because of just how useful it is to have a robust place to live in and avoid the elements, intruders, etc.

To frame prisons as "inherently oppressive" is to pretend that a prison is not just another building with the label "prison" on the outside built to a certain specification of security. Much like a church is just a building where people gather to practice their faith. I realize that these buildings have some unique features that are optimized for their particular purpose, but at each level you drill down, those technologies almost universally co-emerged because of other human needs.

These buildings do not have intrinsic essences, nor were the underlying techniques of engineering used to build them solely developed for the purpose of incarcerating people or praying to various gods.

> The adoption of a technology is done by the decision of a human

And so is the inception of the original idea that led to the establishment of the technology. The tools we build are a manifestation of collective human consciousness at any given point in time. That goes not just for the ways we use technology, but also for the technologies we invent and decide to build in the first place.

The call is coming from inside the house. The thing we need to be focusing on is our own nature, and how we tend to oppress each other. This is a problem not solved by assigning technology with properties like "oppressive". Technology is not oppressive. People are.

> Nobody's claiming that computers have imposed themselves on society...

Oppression is generally something that humans do to other humans (I agree that they use tools along the way). By saying that computers are inherently oppressive, you're implying that computers are somehow imposing themselves on society. If a human has to be involved for the oppression to occur, the computer is by definition not inherently oppressive.

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