Google, Meta, X and all the Tech Bros

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It takes a lot to make Alec comment on digital technology

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image

ETA

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I may have just found my next album title.

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Well, “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” does include the possibility of being stabbed 23 times.

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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

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The Ides of March will be next saturday, Just saying.

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I mean
 maybe, but when has just mirroring what the right is doing ever been an effective strategy?

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I still have my techno-optimism.

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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.

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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.

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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!

:roll_eyes:

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


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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.

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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.

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