{"id":3747,"date":"2024-12-20T02:00:54","date_gmt":"2024-12-20T10:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/?p=3747"},"modified":"2024-12-18T21:42:50","modified_gmt":"2024-12-19T05:42:50","slug":"tech-and-the-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2024\/12\/20\/tech-and-the-present\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech and the Present"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in the late 1990s, when we were all getting used to email and setting up websites and googling was so new it wasn\u2019t a verb yet, the business pages of our newspapers were full of stories that went something like this:<\/p>\n

The internet is fun, but how is anyone going to make money off of that?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fast forward twenty-fiveish years and we have been overwhelmed by the answer: capitalism. Turns out the internet wasn\u2019t immune to being taken over by people who were more interested in short-term profit than in making cool stuff that worked and was useful to people.<\/p>\n

This is an even deeper situation than enshittification. Ed Zitron calls it the Rot Economy and he discusses it in great detail here<\/a>. (Very long and very worth reading.)<\/p>\n

So these days we have constant updates that break things, apps that limit your rights in a way that using regular web browsers does not, and devices intended to steal our attention by constantly intruding.<\/p>\n

I remain amused by the idea that the young folks are digital natives because they\u2019ve grown up with cell phones and tablets. What they\u2019ve grown up with are devices that have set us up for the worst excesses of so-called AI, ones that supposedly think for you, only they can\u2019t actually think, so they approximate.<\/p>\n

And because those young folks are not also raised with the knowledge of how things work, they don\u2019t always recognize the many errors. Plus they assume \u2013 because it\u2019s true of everything they use \u2013 that everything will glitch all the time.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve said before<\/a>, it\u2019s absurd to lump Boomers, who have been using computers for 40 years and include a large number of people who built their own or wrote their own software, with their parents and grandparents who were approaching retirement years in the 1980s and 90s and didn\u2019t have to learn to use this stuff for work.<\/p>\n

I may not be great at Discord, Slack, and online meeting multitasking \u2013 in fact, I suck at all of those \u2013 but I am very good at recognizing when I\u2019m being bamboozled. And a large amount of what\u2019s going on in the digital world is, in fact, bamboozlement.<\/p>\n

Late stage capitalism ate the tech industry and \u2014 unfortunately \u2014 the internet. <\/p>\n

This breaks my heart, because I love what the internet can be. And I love what tech can do \u2014 make it easier for us to communicate, to learn, to figure out how things work.<\/p>\n

Capitalist tech lords \u2014 the broligarchs \u2014 with their half-baked libertarian ideas and misunderstanding of science fiction (it\u2019s not like they ever studied serious philosophy or literature or history so that they had any understanding of something beyond short-term profit) are now behind the current fascist takeover of our government as well. Yeah, the grifter\u2019s still there, taking money wherever he can get his greedy little hands on it, and so are the religious extremists who want to bully everyone, but the people out to destroy our government are the broligarchs.<\/p>\n

They may well succeed.<\/p>\n

This does more than break my heart; it scares the shit out of me. Late stage capitalism has already drained so many people\u2019s resources, and now these fuckers want to take the last bits of it from us.<\/p>\n

No mail service. No clean water or air. No vaccines or medical research. No social security.<\/p>\n

And all for what? So some billionaires can add another zero to their net worth? So some corporations can control more of our lives than they do already?<\/p>\n

We already have people living in investments, not housing \u2014 and those are the people lucky enough to have a place to live. Far too many are living on the street (even though that\u2019s illegal) or supposed to be grateful for a badly run rental property.<\/p>\n

This is unsustainable and the broligarch\u2019s libertarian dreams are also unsustainable. It\u2019s going to crumble.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t like the idea of being buried under some of that destruction. I can see ways to work out of this stage without throwing so many people to the wolves (though, come to think of it, wolves might do a better job of taking care of them), but I don\u2019t think we\u2019re going to get it now that we\u2019ve put grifters, broligarchs, and religious extremists in charge.<\/p>\n

Small islands of coherence. That\u2019s our best path forward. We can\u2019t fix the whole system in one fell swoop \u2013 much as I\u2019d like to \u2013 but we might make a few things that can pick up the pieces in good ways.<\/p>\n

Islands of coherence comes from an observation by Ilya Prigogine:<\/p>\n

When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He was coming at this from chemistry and physics, but his view was much broader than the scientific. (When I started looking him up, having stumbled across the quotation, I found connections that led back to Donna Haraway. Amazing how many great ideas lead back to Haraway.)<\/p>\n

Much of the official discourse these days \u2013 from politics to mainstream journalism to corporate decisionmaking \u2013 is so incoherent that trying to engage it is pointless. Building something coherent that might overcome it feels more useful.<\/p>\n

I mean, how do you argue with a politics that puts vaccine deniers in charge of public health or Putin sympathizers in charge of national security? Or corporations that deny insurance coverage to people whose lives are at stake? Or journalists who are unwilling to call out fascism when it\u2019s on their doorstep?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not quite sure what coherence looks like these days, but it\u2019s my goal to find out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in the late 1990s, when we were all getting used to email and setting up websites and googling was so new it wasn\u2019t a verb yet, the business pages of our newspapers were full of stories that went something like this: The internet is fun, but how is anyone going to make money off […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,363],"tags":[971,973,350,972],"class_list":["post-3747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","category-technology","tag-broligarchs","tag-coherence","tag-internet","tag-prigogine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3747"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3748,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3747\/revisions\/3748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}