Complaining about new technology is a genre at least as old as the printing press, which doesn’t mean any given complaint is invalid but does suggest there’s a high standard for thinking anyone needs to read your particular screed.  For all the trouble with Twitter, it beats hand writing a copy of the Bible, in ink, on vellum.

Bearing that in mind, what is exactly is your problem with the digital revolution?

Progressives tend to be at a disadvantage in a debate over new technology because – hey, they’re in favor of progress, right?  For a liberal critique of technology to make any sense at all it has to be grounded in first principles, penetrating, and with a sense of irony at the machinations of history.

For the most part, contemporary liberalism isn’t up to the task.  First principles aren’t organic enough, penetration is gender normative, and the machinations of history depended upon oppressed labor.   If you want a critique of technology done right, you have to go to a conservative – if you can find one with anything approaching a sense of irony.

My favorite contemporary Luddite is unquestionably Matt Labash, longtime writer at The Weekly Standard, a magazine whose noxious spewings of Movement Conservatism (which is to real conservatism what “playing doctor” is to either surgery or sex) hides a small stable of brilliant cultural writers.

Labash’s (relatively) recent article on Twitter is surprisingly good to read, given how little there is to say about Twitter that hasn’t already been bitl.ly ‘d;  but it was reading his superb article on a “Meme Conference” that gave me a crystal clear insight into the nature of our cultural decline. Continue reading My Favorite Luddite – and the nature of cultural suicide →

It seems obvious in hind-sight that Google’s infamously difficult job interview questions weren’t actually going to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Here’s the thing:  it was pretty obvious in foresight, too.

I mean, come on:  “How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?”  “How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?” “Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco?”

What exactly were these ever going to accomplish?  Given their “on the spot” nature, how could they possibly reward anything besides the ability to spout bullshit – or to over-simplify the world down to a level at which it would never actually work in practice?

That should have been obvious to anyone:  but Google persisted in asking these questions for years.  They even made it a selling point:  THIS is how exclusive we are.  THIS is how difficult it is to break into our culture.  It made them think their wheat had extra fiber.  As Laszlo Bock (Google’s sinisterly named “senior vice president of people operations”) told the New York Times:  “They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.”

Google loves to feel smart.  More than actually being smart, apparently.  Because isn’t it fascinating how a company that is so driven by “data” – everything has to have a quantifiable rationale – instituted a series of major hiring policies that never had any data to back them.

How did this happen?  How could the company that epitomizes Big Data spend years on a course that never had any research backing it up, and was (self-evidently) flat out wrong?

Because:  Google loves to feel smart.  And it doesn’t get that about itself:  it doesn’t understand just how dangerous its assumptions about its own intelligence are.  Continue reading Reason I don’t trust Google #4 – they have no sense of the limitations of their own culture →

I’m becoming a bigger and bigger fan of Evgeny Morozov, author of “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism.”  He’s not the first person to come up with these ideas – there’s hardly anything about culture change that the great Philip Rieff didn’t say first – but he presents the issues so well, forcing me to reconsider points I’ve been flogging for years.

His New York Times editorial “Machines of Laughter and Forgetting” is one such article.

On the one hand, Morozov is suggesting that we need to re-evaluate our relationship with technology – and how it affects our habits of thought – in critical ways.  (I’m going to quote at length):

“(T)echnology can save us a lot of cognitive effort, for “thinking” needs to happen only once, at the design stage. We’ll surround ourselves with gadgets and artifacts that will do exactly what they are meant to do — and they’ll do it in a frictionless, invisible way. “The ideal system so buries the technology that the user is not even aware of its presence,” announced the design guru Donald Norman in his landmark 1998 book, “The Invisible Computer.” But is that what we really want?

The hidden truth about many attempts to “bury” technology is that they embody an amoral and unsustainable vision. Pick any electrical appliance in your kitchen. The odds are that you have no idea how much electricity it consumes, let alone how it compares to other appliances and households. This ignorance is neither natural nor inevitable; it stems from a conscious decision by the designer of that kitchen appliance to free up your “cognitive resources” so that you can unleash your inner Oscar Wilde on “contemplating” other things. Multiply such ignorance by a few billion, and global warming no longer looks like a mystery.

Whitehead, it seems, was either wrong or extremely selective: on many important issues, civilization only destroys itself by extending the number of important operations that we can perform without thinking about them. On many issues, we want more thinking, not less.”

Yes … yes … absolutely, but … by the same token, there’s a difference between not falling unaware into habits of thought (or lack of thought, in this case) and not needing to go over every otherwise settled question every time we want to make a phone call. Continue reading How transparent do we want our technology to be? →

I’m not the least surprised by this article noting how vital human judgment is to the smooth working of so many of the processes we assume have been fully automated by now:

“People evaluate, edit or correct an algorithm’s work. Or they assemble online databases of knowledge and check and verify them — creating, essentially, a crib sheet the computer can call on for a quick answer. Humans can interpret and tweak information in ways that are understandable to both computers and other humans.

Question-answering technologies like Apple’s Siri and I.B.M.’s Watson rely particularly on the emerging machine-man collaboration. Algorithms alone are not enough.

Twitter uses a far-flung army of contract workers, whom it calls judges, to interpret the meaning and context of search terms that suddenly spike in frequency on the service.”

The increasing dependence upon machine intelligence to run our world isn’t really “dependence” in the classical sense at all:  human intelligence is becoming increasingly vital in making the thing work.  Continue reading What have you done for a cyborg lately? →