Oddbean new post about login | logout No such thing as neutral technology. There I said it.
All things are warring things, including man and their intangible ideas. nostr:nevent1qqsxt70nhdnk2367w4hhjnpchzqdrgw9fspxxrfn0vye5j82hxzwyqspz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygqxk7qe6lcu0a28yyvzvmkhhj58shww4cy7xm4r5jhkvhrdrkpj0spsgqqqqqqsy5jyak
Technology is neutral by definition. Humans applying and using technologies in various ways is what can be attributed as good vs. bad or any other dichotomy. It is not the gun killing another man, it is the one behind the trigger.
Nope. That is a key tenet of McLuhan. A rock in the ground is neutral. A rock in hand (technology) is not.
Still not convinced, but you made an interesting point. Thank you
Yeah, it was my contention, too, that ‘technology’ was neutral, but now am changing my position, ever since doing a deep-read of McLuhan. For example, the phonetic alphabet (technology) bulldozed over the tribal world and gave rise to the sense of self as an individual. That combined with the wheel and parchment enabled the Romans to create one of the most durable empires in history.
Neutrality is a myth
there's definitely the "can the master's tools be used to dismantle the master's house" kind of discussion so i agree it's not entirely neutral, but it's also not completely opinionated on everything imbued by the author there's a degree of neutrality, there can be shared goals and underlying methods, otherwise there would be no reason to cooperate on technology at all (which would entirely undermine FOSS), and clearly different people can use the same technology
I think for us, the ‘neutral’ aspect is that we agree that decentralization is a frontier of a new system, not a feature of an existing system.
right- decentralization is a dimension of neutrality in itself- in that the technology doesn't prefer any specific center of control also while "technology shapes society" (so it's not "neutral" in that sense) is very true, but at the same time, often not *intentionally*, it doesn't follow the creator's design there's many unpredictable second, third, and further order consequences of a certain technological development (take say, the laser, or the internet, which had very broad unpredictable impact) as WIlliam GIbson said "the street finds its uses for things" this is the mistake many journalist-minded people make, they say, go chasing after say, fiatjaf's political affiliations and then use that to denounce nostr as evil technology, or say, "IBM worked with the nazi's in WW2 so computers are nazi technology" or many variants of that, like the "techbro" blather where people don't like the state of society so it must have been the designed intent of some evil computer scientists so i'm also quite wary of that type of reasoning, reality is as usual much more nuanced 🙂