My latest for Pull Request!
As someone who straddles various worlds, I often find myself trying to explain one world to another, or at least, mounting a last-ditch defense.
thepullrequest.com/p/there-is-no-…
Still...I felt a bit ambushed at a shabbat dinner in LA last week, when I was suddenly called to account for the depredations of tech.
It reminded me of backpacking in Europe in the 90s and suddenly having to defend America, mostly against a chasm of misunderstanding.
If you’d asked a Bohemian peasant in 1618 if the printing press was a good idea—that’s the first year of the Thirty Years’ War, the bloodiest war in European history until WWII—they’d also say it was probably a horrible mistake.
Ditto the internet, but my co-guests disagreed.
That's the problem with 'Them', whether about tech or anything else: it presumes level of collective and malign will that just doesn't exist. The reality is a combination of happenstance, human greed, and the very occasional act of inspired competence.
There's a 'Them' Corollary to the well-knwon Gell-Man Amnesia:
Your industry is some lurching, hacked-together mess, but the moment you read or discuss any other industry, you imagine it like the Borg in Star Trek: this monolithic hive of implacable and malign collective will.
If the ‘Them’ didn’t exist (as indeed it mostly does not), it would be necessary to invent it: humanity, even sophisticated and worldly individuals, will default to a morality-play script of heroes, villains, and cameo bit players to frame reality. We can't help ourselves.
We are all the other’s other, some Them’s Them. We’re defined less by our own attributes, and more the ‘Them’ we choose to loudly condemn as the real source of our problems.
Still odd that tech is everyone's great evil Them, whether left or right.
The real difference between technologists and everyone else these days is whether you believe in the current institutions, and whether they're worth saving, or if you'd rather blow them all sky-high with technology.
That's the real divide these days.
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