While I mentioned earlier the transfer of agency from humans and
deflection of rage to inanimate objects, this points to something
equally fundamental: exploitation and crime by proxy. Machines are
propagandized as entities by themselves. The debate starts to turn
around machines and their idiosyncrasies, safely squeezing out the real
issues.
It's like your town is being terrorized by armed bandits, and wise
heads, philosophers, media, politicians are talking about types of
bullets, different kinds of injuries they cause, the nozzle velocity,
construction of guns, whether barrels are threaded or not, gun
manufacturers, cost of guns, dangers that guns pose, should
fragmentation bullets be allowed, etc.
Everything except mentioning the bandits and gallows poles.
On 3/23/19, 10:00, tbyfield wrote:
More generally, entire swaths of current 'technology' debates — about
automation and IoT, 'adversarial' this and that, how advertising is
subverting democracy, etc, etc – are naive historical reenactments of
front-page debates from the mid-1950s. Lots of factors enable that
naivete, and voguish talk about 'complexity' is one of them. It's not an
accident that complexity became a pop phenomenon starting in the
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
