"I began this post with the (now laughable) intent of offering a few brief comments on Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto published in October of last year...
I would frame the manifesto as a revivalist sermon, or more specifically perhaps, a jeremiad, calling for repentance and a return to the religion of technology. Such a sermon is a response to the process of secularization, which has accelerated in the last decade."
"When secularization comes for the religion of technology, you may also expect to see the rise of reformers calling for changes within the parameters of the religion. When technologists find themselves repenting of their previous work and calling for more ethical technology, you are dealing with a reform movement within the tradition. For what it’s worth, Andreessen’s sermon may also be characterized as a counter-reformation tract."
"But, of course, Ring presents itself as more than just the surveillance arm of a multibillion dollar corporation deployed to your front door. It hijacks the human need for security or safety and transmutes it into a need for Ring. It is chiefly the needs of Amazon that are being met, particularly given the way that Ring allows Amazon to also profit from partnerships with police departments."
"And as Illich would have readily predicted, this dependence on a corporate product comes at the additional cost of alienating neighbors, eroding social trust, and replacing mutual interdependence with a state of perpetual suspicion."
"... the rest of the work is an attempt to provide just such an enumeration and discussion of these vital needs with the express purpose of supplying a foundation for the rebuilding of French society. She deals briefly with a set fourteen such needs before turning to a longer discussion of 'rootedness' and 'uprootedness', which opens with this well-known claim: 'To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul'."
"I like to pair this claim with Hannah Arendt’s discussion of loneliness, alienation, and superfluousness, which, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she identifies as ideal conditions for the emergence of totalitarian regimes. 'Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances', Arendt wrote, 'we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth'."
"Combining [Simone] Weil and [Hannah] Arendt, then, we might say that to the degree that the need for rootedness—which is to say, a sense of belonging in relatively stable communities—goes unfulfilled, to that same degree human beings become vulnerable to destructive political regimes."
"...[One] example... is the belief in some quarters that the problem with facial recognition technology is simply that it seems, in its present iteration, to be especially biased against people of color, as if the tool would be just and good as soon as it was calibrated so that people of color were equally legible to its gaze. In other words, equal access to fundamentally degrading institutions and their products is not justice."
Tensions are running high over the imminent entry of InstaGrope into the verse, via Meta's Threads server. Some of you may have noticed me speaking up against the Anti-Fedi Meta Pact, and I want to clarify a few things I think are important.
I'm not arguing against admins moderating their servers' relationships with others. That's nobody's business but theirs. If an admin makes a case-by-case decision to defederate from Threads, well, that's fediverse moderation working as intended.
"One under-appreciated consequence of believing there is such a thing as the “one best way” in every aspect of life is subsequently living with the unyielding pressure to discover it and the inevitable and perpetual frustration of failing to achieve it."