How To Move Improve At Beingness Pissed Off At Big Tech

From Cory Doctorow's Craphound:

My latest Locus column, “Let’s Get Better at Demanding Better from Tech,” looks at how scientific discipline fiction tin sack brand us improve critics of technology scientific discipline yesteryear imagining how tech could locomote used inward deviation social as well as economical contexts than the i nosotros alive inward today.

The “pro-tech” side’s declaration is around variation on, “You can’t larn the social benefits of Facebook without letting us spy on you lot as well as manipulate you lot — if you lot desire to remain inward touching on amongst your friends, that’s the cost of admission.” All every bit good often, the “anti-tech” side takes this premise at human face upwardly value: “Since nosotros can’t hang out amongst our friends online without beingness spied on as well as manipulated, you lot postulate to halt wanting to hang out amongst your friends online.”

But the scientific discipline fiction version of this goes, “What kinds of systems could nosotros educate if nosotros wanted to hang out amongst our friends without beingness spied on as well as manipulated — as well as what kinds of political, regulatory as well as technological interventions would brand those systems easier to build?”

H5N1 critique of technology scientific discipline that focuses on its marketplace conditions, rather than its code, yields upwardly around interesting alternate narratives. It has conk fashionable, for example, to tell that advertising was the master copy sin of online publication. Once the norm emerged that creative operate would locomote gratis as well as paid for through attending – that is, yesteryear showing ads – the wheels were laid inward motion, leading to clickbait, political polarization, as well as invasive, surveillant networks: “If you’re non paying for the product, you’re the product.”

But if nosotros empathise the contours of the advertising marketplace every bit beingness driven yesteryear marketplace conditions, non “attention economics,” a dissimilar even out emerges....MORE