The term is rapidly becoming an empty signifier, though. Tesla’s new master plan boasts of “sustainable abundance.” The Silicon Valley variant of the abundance agenda is just warmed-over techno-optimism — less “let’s rebuild the administrative state and make government work again!” and more “the government should hand big sacks of money to tech startups and exempt them from taxes and regulations. Let our genius builders build!”
24 Matching Annotations
- Last 7 days
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davekarpf.substack.com davekarpf.substack.com
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Brown, John Seely, and Paul Duguid. “A Response to Bill Joy and the Doom-and-Gloom Technofuturists.” 2000. Emerging Technologies: Ethics, Law and Governance, by Gary E. Marchant and Wendell Wallach, edited by Gary E. Marchant and Wendell Wallach, 1st ed., Routledge, 2020, pp. 65–71.
via: https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188_W16/Reprints/Response_to_BillJoy.pdf
annotation URL: urn:x-pdf:1e8f84f1b5e3fb65dfe49ef6f173c79e
A reprint of: <br /> - “Re-Engineering the Future: A Response to Bill Joy and the doom-and-gloom technofuturists,” The Industry Standard, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. 24 April 2000, p.196. - “A Response to Bill Joy and the Doom-and-Gloom Technofuturists,” AAAS Science and Technology Policy Yearbook 2001, edited by Albert H. Teich, Stephen D. Nelson, Celia McEnaney and Stephen J. Lita, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2001.
Cross reference: Bill Joy's paper and notes at urn:x-pdf:753822a812c861180bef23232a806ec0
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- Aug 2025
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Why does the threat of a cunning, replicating robot society look soclose from one perspective, yet so distant from another? The differencelies in the well-known tendency of futurologists to count “1, 2, 3 . . . amillion.” That is, once the first step on a path is taken, it’s very easy toassume that all subsequent steps are trivial.
1, 2, 3, ... profit also follows this general pattern and some companies like Uber, Lyft, Postmates, etc. have found this difficult to do.
Tesla is another example which seems to fit the profile of this piece with respect to Elon Musk having pissed off the very people he was attempting to sell to.
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Having ignored social concerns, however, proponents havemade the people they need to educate profoundly suspicious and hostile.
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But, on the otherhand, social systems—in the form of governments, the courts, formaland informal organizations, social movements, professional networks,local communities, market institutions and so forth—shape, moderateand redirect the raw power of technologies.
I find myself reading this from the perspective not so much of technology, but of these social systems which seem to be being stressed right now. Is it the technologists (Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, etc.) who realize that these systems were part of the technology "problem" in the past and now they've figured out a way to attempt to "capture" people to organize their original ends?
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In Joy’s vision, as in the nuclear one, there’s a recognizable tunnelvision that leaves people out of the picture and focuses on technologyin splendid isolation.
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Similar social forces are at work on technologies today. But becausethe digerati, like technoenthusiasts before them, look to the future withtechnological tunnel vision, they too have trouble bringing other forcesinto view.
great reminder in both technology and politics
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Local file Local file
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Lanier, J. (2013). Who Owns the Future? Simon & Schuster. https://amzn.to/3YzotPZ
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- Jun 2025
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Successful Secretary Presented by Royal Office Typewriters. A Thomas Craven Film Corporation Production, 1966. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If5b2FiDaLk.
Script: Lee Thuna<br /> Educational Consultant: Catharine Stevens<br /> Assistant Director: Willis F. Briley<br /> Design: Francisco Reynders<br /> Director & Producer: Carl A. Carbone<br /> A Thomas Craven Film Corporation Production
"Mother the mail"
gendered subservience
"coding boobytraps"
"I think you'll like the half sheet better. It is faster." —Mr. Typewriter, timestamp
A little bit of the tone of "HAL" from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This is particularly suggestive as H.A.L. was a one letter increment from I.B.M. and the 1966 Royal 660 was designed to compete with IBM's Selectric
This calm voice makes suggestions to a secretary while H.A.L. does it for a male astronaut (a heroic figure of the time period). Suddenly the populace feels the computer might be a bad actor.
"We're living in an electric world, more speed and less effort."—Mr. Typewriter<br /> (techno-utopianism)
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- Royal typewriters
- 1966
- productivity
- secretaries
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- effort
- IBM selectric
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- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
- gendered subservience
- techno-utopianism
- artificial intelligence as overlord
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- Apr 2024
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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archive.org archive.org
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[Steve Jobs]: If you sort of dig beneath the surface,one of the real successes of the Lisa programwas creating an environment where all these crazy people that could reallybe very, very successful.And I guess that's one of the things that Apple's done best.
appreciate the framing of technologists at the early Apple Inc. as "these crazy people".
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[Narrator]: The Cluttered Desk, Index Card,file folders, the in-out basket, the calculator.These are the tools of the office professional's past.Since the dawn of the computer age, better machines have always meant bigger and more powerful.But the software could not accommodate the needs of office professionals who are responsiblefor the look, shape and feel of tomorrow.
In 1983, at the dawn of the personal computer age, Apple Inc. in promotional film entitled "Lisa Soul Of A New Machine" touted their new computer, a 16-bit dual disk drive "personal office system", as something that would do away with "the cluttered desk, index cards, file folders, the in-out basket, [and] the calculator." (00:01)
Some of these things moved to the realm of the computer including the messy desk(top) now giving people two messy desks, a real one and a virtual one. The database-like structure of the card index also moved over, but the subjective index and its search power were substituted for a lower level concordance search.
30 years on, for most people, the value of the database idea behind the humble "index card" has long since disappeared and so it seems here as if it's "just" another piece of cluttery paper.
Appreciate the rosy framing of the juxtaposition of "past" and "future" jumping over the idea of the here and now which includes the thing they're selling, the Lisa computer. They're selling the idealized and unclear future even though it's really just today.
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- Mar 2024
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thebaffler.com thebaffler.com
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Ongweso Jr., Edward. “The Miseducation of Kara Swisher: Soul-Searching with the Tech ‘Journalist.’” The Baffler, March 29, 2024. https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-miseducation-of-kara-swisher-ongweso.
ᔥ[[Pete Brown]] in Exploding Comma
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Sam Harnett’s 2020 paper “Words Matter: How Tech Media Helped Write Gig Companies Into Existence” remains one of the best accounts of how swaths of the media enthusiastically generated on-demand propaganda for the tech industry, directly setting the stage for these firms to exploit, codify, and expand legal loopholes that largely exempted them from regulation as they raided their users for data and generated billions in revenue. Such intellectual acquiescence would, as Harnett writes, “pave the way for a handful of companies that represent a tiny fraction of the economy to have an outsized impact on law, mainstream corporate practices, and the way we think about work.”
Harnett, Sam. “Words Matter: How Tech Media Helped Write Gig Companies into Existence.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY, August 7, 2020. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3668606.
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The long and short of it is that Swisher is not a good journalist—or, framed more generously, that she thrived in an industry with remarkably low standards for which we are still paying the price. For decades, tech journalism and criticism has primarily consisted of glowing gadget reviews, laudatory profiles, and reprinted press releases, all of it colored by Silicon Valley’s self-aggrandizing vision of itself as a laboratory of a brighter future.
The tech press is responsible in part for a large portion of our techno-utopianism. They wore rose colored glasses and didn't ask the more probative questions they should have been asking until it was too late?
Where was our tech Cassandra?
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Internet technology accelerates connections. It does so beyond the human beings evolved ability to cope with inputs. As a result it will accelerate the bad portions of humanity of which there are many we gloss over too often with our rose colored glasses. If we don't approach the world from a humanistic perspective, the bad will swamp us.
Tags
- Satya Nadella
- technology and the military
- bad technology
- access journalism
- rose colored glasses
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- humanity
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- techno-utopianism
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explodingcomma.com explodingcomma.com
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Read [[Pete Brown]] in Exploding Comma
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- Feb 2024
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Local file Local file
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I remember feeling good about nanotechnology after reading Enginesof Creation.
Here's an example of Bill Joy reading about nanotechnology and having positive feelings.
Why are people so pro-technology? Have we evolved this way over 10,000 years? Are there too many technologies with bad effects?
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- Mar 2022
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hackeducation.com hackeducation.com
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The tech industry's historical amnesia — the inability to learn about, to recognize, to remember what has come before — is deeply intertwined with the idea of "disruption" and its firm belief that new technologies are necessarily innovative and are always "progress." I like to cite, as an example, a New Yorker article from a few years ago, an interview with an Uber engineer who'd pleaded guilty to stealing Google's self-driving car technology. "The only thing that matters is the future," he told the magazine. "I don't even know why we study history. It's entertaining, I guess — the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn't really matter. You don't need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow." (I could tie this attitude to the Italian Futurists and to fascism, but that’s a presentation for another day.)
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www.cs.umd.edu www.cs.umd.edu
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http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/trs/97-21/97-21.html
A view of internet technology from 1998. It's filled with techno-utopianism, but provides some thought and admonishment against watching out for design which may have future deleterious consequences.
It's a bit amazing how many problems he highlights as relatively easily solvable are still unsolved and largely untouched: search/search engines, academic publishing workflows, democracy, and general digital humanism.
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Distance education by tele-mentoring, tele-lecturing, and computer mediated conferencing is gradually reshaping education, and is likely to accelerate as the technology becomes more widely available. Additional research and development is needed to ex plore how education can be reshaped in a 24-hour electronic environment in which the teacher shifts from being the "sage on the stage to the guide on the side." The web supports collaborative teaching methods in which students do more than surf the net - - they learn to make waves. Ambitious team projects can provide valuable services to clients who are outside the classroom. These authentic projects can be highly motivating to students as they learn business-oriented and personally enriching skills of communicating, critiquing, and collaborating (Shneiderman, 1998b).
Example of techno-utopianism within the edtech space which largely hasn't come to fruition.
Were there prior references to "sage on the stage to the guide on the side" that indicated the guide on the side not being a person, but the Internet or technology instead?
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Of course, users are still the source of the insight that makes a complete document also a compelling document.
Nice that he takes a more humanistic viewpoint here rather than indicating that it will all be artificial intelligence in the future.
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Refinement is a social process: New ideas are conceived of by individuals, and then they are refined through reviews from knowledgeable peers and mentors.
Refinement is a social process. Sadly it can also be accelerated, often negatively, by unintended socio-economic forces.
The dominance and ills created by surveillance capitalism within social media is one such result driven by capitalism.
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Since any powerful tool, such as a genex, can be used for destructive purposes, the cautions are discussed in Section 5.
Given the propensity for technologists in the late 90s and early 00s to have rose colored glasses with respect to their technologies, it's nice to see at least some nod to potential misuses and bad actors within the design of future tools.
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