> Mr. Toyama used to share that worldview: “I am a recovering technoholic,” he writes. Then he moved to India, to lead the Microsoft lab, and observed a phenomenon that he would come to believe was universal: “Technology’s primary effect is to amplify human forces.” When computers entered rural schools, for instance, guess who held the mouse? Upper-caste boys. Technology wasn’t an intrinsic leveler or a bulldozer to archaic structures: It just gave people new, improved tools to be lovely or horrible to each other in all the old ways.
Technology lets you do more and more extreme versions of what you were going to do anyway. It should come as no surprise that the most newsworthy outcome of putting laptops in the hands of schoolchildren is teachers using them to spy on kids. It's a predictable outcome of the social dynamic, one which technology itself can only amplify, not change.
Of course, technology can be a component enabling larger trends of social change. Consider the industrial revolution. A strong argument can be made that modern technology is a prerequisite for modern liberal democracy. But the immediate impact of industrialization was not liberal democracy throughout Europe. That followed about a century later, on the back of human forces.