It is not necessarily bad for technology companies to take a leaf from sci-fi, but if you really have to, at least try picking the utopian stuff, like Amazon’s Echo, blatantly modeled after Star Trek’s chirpy talking computer, over the unsettling dog-eat-dog hellscape of Snow Crash.
Is the inability to parse satire related to the inability to understand something is a dystopia? I suppose dystopian fictions are simply satire at the core 🤷♀️
Why is dystopian sci-fi seem more ubiquitous than optomistic sci-fi?
This task force could also meet regularly with tech platforms, and push for structural changes that could help those companies tackle their own extremism and misinformation problems
there's a solid enough conceptual idea here, that society ought be able to voice some sense, direct & govern the platforms forward & along & upwards. there is something lacking, certainly, in that the companies have nothing to listen to, are so alone. (oh yes there are voices but it's a chaos of voices, there's no scheme for guiding oneself through, so the entity must keep picking for itself what to do.)
still though,
It sounds a little dystopian, I’ll grant.
no. it sounds a lot dystopian. very very dystopian.
society could use means to weave together coherence, to establish a democratic growth, proclaim the unity it does have. celebrates, accepts & socializes core things to itself.
Oh, how extraordinarily nice workmen were, she thought
This is the second time her impression of the workers has made me really laugh. This story so far feels like it takes place in some strange utopia, I guess Laura and her family are very rich, but it seems much stranger than just that--the rose bushes are visited by "archangels", Jose is a "butterfly". and 'workers' are practically alien. Laura seems as taken with the beauty around her as if she is seeing it only for the first few times. This story has a very dreamy feel, maybe even a dystopian quality.
There Are No Guardrails on Our Privacy Dystopia
Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia
The arrival of quantified self means that it's no longer just what you type that is being weighed and measured, but how you slept last night, and with whom.
On the one hand, we can foresee these companies extending their reach ever further into everyday life, to a point where it would become difficult to even articulate why you would want a different model, since our use of these technologies and the politics embedded in them also permits or restricts our ways of thinking about how to live.
The indoctrinated future - probably closer than we think.