Thread by @doctorow

There's a Yom Kippur joke I love: the rabbi and the richest man in town are praying, "Oh Lord, I am nothing, I am nothing!"

The synagogue's janitor sees them and joins in: "I am nothing!"

The richest man says to the rabbi: "Look who thinks he's nothing."

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The humblebrag is a wild phenomena, and it's endemic to a certain kind of tech criticism. When a technologist - what @mariafarrell calls a "prodigal tech bro" - confesses that he's an evil genius, then "genius" is the point.

crookedtimber.org/2020/09/23/sto…

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Think of the "AI" scientists who claim that they are about to be responsible for massive waves of technological unemployment, seeming to confess to a sin while actually overpromising on their AI.

pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/gra…

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Or the critique of "surveillance capitalism" that takes at face value ad-tech's outlandish boasts about how good they are at changing peoples' minds with data-mining, and then warns that we're all about to be enslaved to mind-control tech.

onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy…

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Or the hand-wringing over the "trolley problem" of self-driving cars, as though the issue with these cars will be their reliable fine-grained judgments, rather than their unreliability and anticompetitive fealty to their manufacturers.

this.deakin.edu.au/self-improveme…

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This is what @STS_News calls "criti-hype," criticism that actually builds on - and depends on - maintaining the halo of devastating potency that surrounds overhyped technologies.

sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it…

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While it's true that the social problems that technologies create have unique, subtle elements that require a fine-grained understanding of the underlying science, it's a mistake to assume this obviates historical lessons.

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Like, blockchain and proof-of-work and cryptography do bring unique facets to the problems of financial engineering, money-laundering and fraud - but all the problems of financial engineering and money-laundering and fraud are still in the mix.

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Ad-tech and engagement-maximization systems add new wrinkles to the problems of communications monopolies and the epistemological chaos created by corrupt institutions, but the chaos and the monopolies are still central to these problems.

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The problem with many metacritics of tech - people who criticize tech critics - is their assumption that tech is irrelevant. The problem with tech critics themselves is their assumption that tech is dispositive.

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The reality is that tech has formal characteristics - the universality of Turing completeness - that both expand the policy toolkit (the power of interoperability mandates) and constrain it (the futility of cryptography back-doors).

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Criti-hype is real, and its remedy isn't to ignore technicalities and criticize tech as though it was just another industry.

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The remedy is to really understand what tech can and can't do, and to understand that the industry isn't run by super-genuises (evil or otherwise) nor science heroes (or villains).

eof/