A piece I read a few weeks back: The Dark Side of Frictionless Technology.
A good read for a bunch of reasons, but one thing I'd noted down to come back around to was this:
I’m obviously not against innovation or building great things. But in this newsletter, I’ve criticized Silicon Valley’s impulse toward Builder Brain: “a particular line of thinking, one that seems to run the risk of missing the root cause of a problem in service of a more exciting solution.” I see it in the jargony, scam-riddled pyramid schemes and hype cycles surrounding Web3; I see it in the technology industry’s reluctance to embrace the Right to Repair movement; and I see it in so much of the pompous arrogance of tech founders and investors who think they can waltz into an industry with little expertise or understanding and disrupt it.
(Relevant right now for no reason in particular...)
It does come back to what I was talking a bit about yesterday in Birdwatch:
As for Musk himself, well, he really is showing himself up, isn't he? Musk a) believes he is smarter than everyone else and b) holds a very simplistic (and additionally wrong) view of the world. Having all that money and power has kept him in so much of a bubble that this has never really been challenged.
So that means, when he looks at a problem in a sphere about which he knows nothing and comes up with a simplistic solution, he believes that the only reason that no one else has done that already is down to a failure of their intelligence. NOT, as is the truth, down to a failure of his intelligence and the fact that the domain he's gazing at is more complicated, and actually other people do understand it a lot better than him.
This connects together in 'technosolutionism' -- a term I've been using for a few years without being quite clear as to its provenance -- the (implied to be mistaken) belief that technology is what can solve our big problems.
Now, that's not to suggest that technology can't solve problems. It's the idea that technology alone is all we have been lacking in the pursuit of solving some big, extant problems. Any problem we have is one we just haven't found the right technology for yet.
Which is obviously bunkum. The whole 'NFTs in gaming' thing fits into that -- the idea that the reason 'gamers' don't have the ability to transfer digital items that they own between games and ecosystems is because we haven't been able to do that, technologically. Ignoring, y'know, all the social, legal, business model, etc. problems with that.
(I think cryptocurrencies fall foul of this also, albeit in a different way. There are ways in which they are technologically distinct from traditional banking and currencies. But treating them as technological solutions and therefore infallible because they are technological solutions, is nonsense. Traditional banking is also riddled with technology; however, so many of the problems cryptocurrency purports to solve are social or political problems of trust and regulation.)
I haven't revisited this yet, but my mind does regularly return to this essay -- also in The Atlantic, actually -- from Debbie Chachra: Why I Am Not a Maker.
Instead we ask for dreams from our machines
and I’m no technophobe but
They’re just not made for this –
to give us visions in the smoke
to dream beyond the glass and draw for us some meaning from the gaps
in our sandcastle models of a world.