The Most Important Thing About A Technology

Every Time We Give A Musician The Advice To Give Away The Music And Sell The T-shirt, We're Saying, "don't Make Your Living In This More Elevated Way. Instead, Reverse This Social Progress, And Choose A More Physical Way To Make A Living." We're Sending Them To Peasanthood, Very Much Like The Maoists Have.

If We Allow Our Self-congratulatory Adoration Of Technology To Distract Us From Our Own Contact With Each Other, Then Somehow The Original Agenda Has Been Lost.

Individual Web Pages As They First Appeared In The Early 1990s Had The Flavour Of Person-hood. Myspace Preserved Some Of That Flavour, Though A Process Of Regularized Formatting Had Begun. Facebook Went Further, Organizing People Into Multiple-choice Identities While Wikipedia Seeks To Erase Point Of View Entirely. If A Church Or Government Were Doing These Things, It Would Feel Authoritarian, But When Technologists Are The Culprits, We Seem Hip, Fresh, And Inventive. People Accept Ideas Presented In Technological Form That Would Be Abhorrent In Any Other Forms

One Thing That I Have Been Trying To Do Is Bring Together In Places Like Bosnia Technologists Who Create Ever-more Destructive Land Mines [and Convince Them Not To Build More Dangerous Mines]. And That Has Actually Worked.

The Problem I Have With Socialist Utopias Is There's Some Kind Of Committees Trying To Soften Outcomes For People. I Think That Imposes Models Of Outcomes For Other People's Lives. So In A Spiritual Sense There's Some Bit Of Libertarian In Me. But The Critical Thing For Me Is Moderation. And If You Let That Go Far You Do End Up With A Winner-take-all Society That Ultimately Crushes Everybody Even Worse.