CyberShow's Latest Episode Covers How Technology is Getting Worse (in General)
Listen to the episode (MP3)
THE latest (and new) episode of the CyberShow (less direct link) was mentioned in the sister site only moments ago. I was listening to it while curating Daily Links and it's worth sharing here too, along with some further commentary that's more personal.
As a matter of fact, several of us have listened to the episode while taking mental and textual notes. The episode is a collection of disparate topics and a sporadic focus on human rights in relation to "tech" and what's disappearing, what replaces what things, and how many things have become more stressful and less reliable. Ed and Andy - part of a security-focused group - converse among themselves and also interview people with relevant knowledge in topics like "self-service" (misnomer, we covered this in text and in video years ago, as did Alex Oliva from the FSF).
The CyberShow is done by cynics and critical thinkers a la George Carlin. As contrarians, they call out the "bullshit" and bluntly name the "spades".
Take "self-service" or "self-checkout" as an example.
"The mythical boiling frog" method, as an associate put it earlier, is covered in relation to fashionable consumption trends and 'automation' (that's not; it's about outsourcing work to the customers), as "the coercion was done gradually over time so that people embrace it."
"Another thing with the self-checkout is that if they make a mistake, it is on you and they can come after you over the mistake many weeks after the fact. At that point it is nearly impossible to prove innocence. But that aspect was not raised in the episode."
The episode is about an hour long, but... listening to the CyberShow-type format means it's mostly split into segments, starting with the "disappearance of reliable communication... [and] trust" (a subject we revisit so often here).
As recently noted in Techrights, especially in relation to landlines being phased out, people "cannot make reliable emergency calls if [they] had to" (quoting Andy).
The show is worth listening to, especially if you are sceptical of user-hostile trajectories of "tech".
As Andy says, "I am a computer scientist who doesn't have a smartphone" and "you'd have to be clinically insane to have one".
"It was a rather good CyberShow again," a friend has told me. "They covered a diverse range of topics."
My wife plans to listen to it too. Neither she nor I have a smartphone and we feel better for it. People who actually understand how those gadgets work typically know why it's better to avoid them.
"Anyway it was very well though out," the friend said about this episode.
The show is very... "different"... and a breath of fresh air. █