The Cyber Show on Technology Having Become a Tool of Mass Psychosis, Not Enablement or Emancipation
This morning Andy and Helen released a new episode, entitled Sex, Lies, and Tape Delay.
There's also this new article about what technology has been turned into. It is like a weapon or tool of mass oppression:
Technology used to be driven by hope and imagination. Today it is driven by fear. This change, from lubricant to corrosive, is driving us all quite nutty.[...]
Today "AI" pitched by some as a comparable world-changing event, yet it is a distinctly different phenomenon. It is nonetheless dubbed an "arms race". Against whom?
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There is no present indication that "AI" is about to "take over". Indeed, part of the complex problem of "AI" is that it also threatens to disappear overnight in a stupendous economic implosion exceeding that of 1929. It would certainly lead to massive collapse. Every politician in the world will work overtime to make sure the public, not Sam Altman or any Big Tech players pay the price for colossal speculative failure.
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Digitalisation also brings a loss of property rights, Nobody really owns the gadgets or media they purchase. We just temporarily rent them. Our personal data in the cloud exists only at the pleasure of its keepers who may delete the copy they control at any time, for any reason. Books, movies and our own personal files can disappear from our devices via documented and undocumented back-doors that give access to intruders. Cybersecurity is an illusion.
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Rather than increasing the longevity of information, as when people say "The Internet Never Forgets", the truth is rather the opposite. The selective memory hole that is the decaying web, unreliable cloud storage, disposable devices, model collapse and awful cybersecurity, makes most of our digital lives quite fleeting.
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The gulags may have gone but threats to employment, social status, career opportunity, and financial comfort are now overt. Being dubbed a "Luddite" was a stick that seemed to work remarkably well, despite being a century or two past its sell-by date. As I mentioned before, that ploy to marginalise regular sceptical folk is backfiring. There are vanishingly few actual anti-technologists. Meanwhile the growing and literate anti-technofascist movement clearly sees the difference between beneficent tech necessary for modernity and the threat posed by a small bunch of megalomaniac psychopaths in the tech industry. The unresolved issues of human-technology relations raised by 19th century English textile workers have simply resurfaced. They were previously put down by extreme violence, which of course solves nothing.
Read on. Andy's closing words are: "As I put it in Digital Vegan, we have to stop believing technology will save us and start asking, can we save technology? If we can, we may be smart enough to use it to save ourselves." █