Attention Economy


Thursday, August 12, 2021

Tech and Society

He predicted the dark side of the Internet 30 years ago. Why did no one listen?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/12/philip-agre-ai-disappeared/
Philip Agre, a computer scientist turned humanities professor, was prescient about many of the ways technology would impact the world 

We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/sunday/facebook-surveillance-society-technology.html 

It’s All Rigged: What Robinhood and Facebook have in common
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/02/gamestop-mess-shows-internet-rigged-too/618040/
ZEYNEP TUFEKCI notes:
“Self-organized groups have been using the web to act on the physical world for a while. The tech companies that enable this behavior are themselves old. … We’ve had many years to think smarter about what digital connectivity means. And yet, we still face this idea that the internet is a game, that the virtual world is something distinct from the real one. This condescension is even embedded in the phrase IRL - “in real life,” meaning not online.
But the internet isn’t a game. It’s real. And it’s not just a neutral mirror that passively reflects society. One hears that notion from tech elites who’d like to deflect blame from their own creations, which have both empowered and enriched them. “It’s just a tool,” they say. This same mentality is what made Mark Zuckerberg say that it was a “pretty crazy idea” that Facebook had anything to do with Donald Trump’s election—a statement he had to walk back, in part, because it contradicted everything that Facebook usually claims: that its software matters; that it influences people; that it changes, rather than merely reflects, the world”. 

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