There’s an old Roman marching song that satirized Caesar.
Citizens, keep an eye on your wives, we’re bringing back the bald adulterer
He fucked away the gold in Gaul that you loaned him here in Rome
Caesar conquered the Gauls, Nicomedes conquered Caesar (as in, sexually)
Caesar triumphed in conquering the Gauls
Nicomedes does not triumph in conquering Caesar
I can imagine these guys singing it and snickering
The Ides of March will be next saturday, Just saying.
I mean… maybe, but when has just mirroring what the right is doing ever been an effective strategy?
I still have my techno-optimism.
He’s rerunning The Apprentice. Send those residuals right into Trump’s pocket. Hell - he’ll probably cook the streaming numbers to send Donnie more money.
I don’t think a left version of techno-optimism makes any sense because the problems don’t have to do with things people can’t do, they have to do with things they shouldn’t do. Right now the biggest obstacle to abundance is that everything we accomplish keeps being stolen and turned against the rest of us.
I mean, the most obvious place where technology might help is clean energy – and yet even there the biggest limit to progress is that oil companies keep sabotaging it. We could use better ways to treat diseases, but Covid wasn’t so deadly because people couldn’t figure out how to stop it, it was because businesses complained and the right refused. I don’t even know where to begin with Khan’s example of AI. Talking about technology buries that it’s all social problems.
Welp, apparently, they’re doing a whole series of these “why isn’t the left ALL IN on modern tech!!!” this week…
This one is saying the same thing, but in a slightly different, condescending way! FUN!
I think this person and the previous one are just… missing the point of the left wing critique of what’s happening in tech right now. They really should be reading folks like Doctorow, Merchant, and Zitron to understand the leftist perspective a bit better…
Yeah, the left aren’t criticizing the tech as much as they are how it’s being used. Tech is very much a general purpose tool, and like a hammer, can build or destroy things depending on the weilder.
Agreed, and the last article I posted addresses that point (that technology is a neutral tool)… but, also, Is it though? I’m not sure that it is. Was the nuclear bomb “neutral”? Has social media been “neutral”? People creating technology are not themselves “neutral”, so I find it hard to think that the things that they create are themselves neutral… How much of what’s been created has merely shifted power around in our society to privilege some over others (tech-dude-bros over all of us).
I think these are questions worth addressing and debating… But what I’m getting from these articles is that these questions should not be, and that instead they should accept that the technology that exists is a “good” think… I don’t know if either of these have addressed the deeper question of whether or not these technologies ARE actually neutral tools, or if how they are made and what they actually are doing right now tell us something different.
That’s a good question, I do tend to think that there are certain implementations of tech that are definitely not good, nuclear power is neutral, nuclear bombs are not. Social media has actually helped marginalized people find community (as an example), specific implementations, following “make the stonks go eternally up” rules tend not to be.
Definitely something that could use a much deeper exploration.
Condescending and stupid. “The left should be upset at how technology is used, rather than anti tech itself”. Because the left are definitely all the second, being rather famously a monolith in their opinions. Hey, speaking of technology, here’s an artificial human we created out of straw!
I wonder what the point of these is, because it’s definitely not to invite any kind of reasoned discussion.
The authors…
Probably the clicks… ENGAGEMENT IS KING, BAAAABEEEEEEE…
That and the fact that tech companies are building ever-larger data centers that require gigawatts of power to operate as they build crappy AI systems. Right now in the US something like 5% of all power usage is going to data centers, and it’s growing fast. Microsoft is restarting the infamous plant on Three Mile Island to send 800 megawatts to its data centers. That’s more than the power output of Hoover Dam.
So in that instance, at least, technology is definitely hurting the progress of switching to green energy because they’re requiring much more energy to be generated than what we’d otherwise need.
Meta rep flagged ‘critiques of tech industry figures’ as ‘sensitive or controversial content’
Paging Saint Streisand! Paging Saint Streisand!
Burb-claves you say?
