#Technological Determinism

[omegaphilosophia]

Exploring the Philosophical Landscape of Technology: Theories and Perspectives

The philosophy of technology is a rich and evolving field that explores the nature, impact, and ethical dimensions of technology. Here are some key theories and approaches within this field:

Technological Determinism: This theory suggests that technology shapes society and human behavior more than individuals or society shape technology. It proposes that technological developments have a predetermined, often inevitable, impact on social, cultural, and economic structures.

Social Construction of Technology (SCOT): SCOT theory argues that technologies are not inherently good or bad but are socially constructed. It focuses on the process by which technologies are developed, adopted, and adapted based on the values and interests of different social groups.

Postphenomenology: Drawing from phenomenology, this approach explores how technology mediates our interactions with the world. It examines the ways in which technology influences our perception, embodiment, and experiences.

Actor-Network Theory (ANT): ANT considers both human and non-human actors (like technology) as equal participants in shaping social networks and processes. It emphasizes the role of technology in mediating human interactions and agency.

Ethics of Technology: This area of philosophy explores the ethical dimensions of technological development and use. It delves into topics such as privacy, surveillance, artificial intelligence ethics, and the moral responsibilities of technologists.

Philosophy of Information: This branch investigates the fundamental nature of information and its role in technology. It examines concepts like data, knowledge, and information ethics in the digital age.

Critical Theory of Technology: Rooted in critical theory, this approach critiques the social and political implications of technology. It seeks to uncover power structures and inequalities embedded in technological systems.

Feminist Philosophy of Technology: This perspective focuses on the intersection of gender and technology. It examines how technology can reinforce or challenge gender norms and inequalities.

Environmental Philosophy of Technology: This theory explores the environmental impact of technology, including topics like sustainability, resource depletion, and the ethics of technological solutions to environmental challenges.

Existentialist Philosophy of Technology: Drawing from existentialism, this approach considers the impact of technology on human existence and individuality. It explores questions of alienation, authenticity, and freedom in a technological world.

Human Enhancement Ethics: With the advancement of biotechnology, this theory addresses the ethical dilemmas surrounding human enhancement technologies, including genetic engineering and cognitive enhancement.

Pragmatism and Technology: Pragmatist philosophy examines how technology influences our practical, everyday experiences and shapes our interactions with the world.

These theories and approaches within the philosophy of technology provide valuable insights into how technology influences and is influenced by society, as well as the ethical considerations that arise in our increasingly technologically driven world.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How lock-in hurts design

Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

If you've ever read about design, you've probably encountered the idea of "paving the desire path." A "desire path" is an erosion path created by people departing from the official walkway and taking their own route. The story goes that smart campus planners don't fight the desire paths laid down by students; they pave them, formalizing the route that their constituents have voted for with their feet.

Desire paths aren't always great (Wikipedia notes that "desire paths sometimes cut through sensitive habitats and exclusion zones, threatening wildlife and park security"), but in the context of design, a desire path is a way that users communicate with designers, creating a feedback loop between those two groups. The designers make a product, the users use it in ways that surprise the designer, and the designer integrates all that into a new revision of the product.

This method is widely heralded as a means of "co-innovating" between users and companies. Designers who practice the method are lauded for their humility, their willingness to learn from their users. Tech history is strewn with examples of successful paved desire-paths.

Take John Deere. While today the company is notorious for its war on its customers (via its opposition to right to repair), Deere was once a leader in co-innovation, dispatching roving field engineers to visit farms and learn how farmers had modified their tractors. The best of these modifications would then be worked into the next round of tractor designs, in a virtuous cycle:

https://securityledger.com/2019/03/opinion-my-grandfathers-john-deere-would-support-our-right-to-repair/

But this pattern is even more pronounced in the digital world, because it's much easier to update a digital service than it is to update all the tractors in the field, especially if that service is cloud-based, meaning you can modify the back-end everyone is instantly updated. The most celebrated example of this co-creation is Twitter, whose users created a host of its core features.

Retweets, for example, were a user creation. Users who saw something they liked on the service would type "RT" and paste the text and the link into a new tweet composition window. Same for quote-tweets: users copied the URL for a tweet and pasted it in below their own commentary. Twitter designers observed this user innovation and formalized it, turning it into part of Twitter's core feature-set.

Companies are obsessed with discovering digital desire paths. They pay fortunes for analytics software to produce maps of how their users interact with their services, run focus groups, even embed sneaky screen-recording software into their web-pages:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-dark-side-of-replay-sessions-that-record-your-every-move-online/

This relentless surveillance of users is pursued in the name of making things better for them: let us spy on you and we'll figure out where your pain-points and friction are coming from, and remove those. We all win!

But this impulse is a world apart from the humility and respect implied by co-innovation. The constant, nonconsensual observation of users has more to do with controlling users than learning from them.

That is, after all, the ethos of modern technology: the more control a company can exert over its users ,the more value it can transfer from those users to its shareholders. That's the key to enshittification, the ubiquitous platform decay that has degraded virtually all the technology we use, making it worse every day:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

When you are seeking to control users, the desire paths they create are all too frequently a means to wrestling control back from you. Take advertising: every time a service makes its ads more obnoxious and invasive, it creates an incentive for its users to search for "how do I install an ad-blocker":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

More than half of all web-users have installed ad-blockers. It's the largest consumer boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But zero app users have installed ad-blockers, because reverse-engineering an app requires that you bypass its encryption, triggering liability under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This law provides for a $500,000 fine and a 5-year prison sentence for "circumvention" of access controls:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Beyond that, modifying an app creates liability under copyright, trademark, patent, trade secrets, noncompete, nondisclosure and so on. It's what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

This is why services are so horny to drive you to install their app rather using their websites: they are trying to get you to do something that, given your druthers, you would prefer not to do. They want to force you to exit through the gift shop, you want to carve a desire path straight to the parking lot. Apps let them mobilize the law to literally criminalize those desire paths.

An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to block ads in it (or do anything else that wrestles value back from a company). Apps are web-pages where everything not forbidden is mandatory.

Seen in this light, an app is a way to wage war on desire paths, to abandon the cooperative model for co-innovation in favor of the adversarial model of user control and extraction.

Corporate apologists like to claim that the proliferation of apps proves that users like them. Neoliberal economists love the idea that business as usual represents a "revealed preference." This is an intellectually unserious tautology: "you do this, so you must like it":

https://boingboing.net/2024/01/22/hp-ceo-says-customers-are-a-bad-investment-unless-they-can-be-made-to-buy-companys-drm-ink-cartridges.html

Calling an action where no alternatives are permissible a "preference" or a "choice" is a cheap trick – especially when considered against the "preferences" that reveal themselves when a real choice is possible. Take commercial surveillance: when Apple gave Ios users a choice about being spied on – a one-click opt of of app-based surveillance – 96% of users choice no spying:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-out-of-app-tracking-in-ios-14-5-analytics-find/

But then Apple started spying on those very same users that had opted out of spying by Facebook and other Apple competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Neoclassical economists aren't just obsessed with revealed preferences – they also love to bandy about the idea of "moral hazard": economic arrangements that tempt people to be dishonest. This is typically applied to the public ("consumers" in the contemptuous parlance of econospeak). But apps are pure moral hazard – for corporations. The ability to prohibit desire paths – and literally imprison rivals who help your users thwart those prohibitions – is too tempting for companies to resist.

The fact that the majority of web users block ads reveals a strong preference for not being spied on ("users just want relevant ads" is such an obvious lie that doesn't merit any serious discussion):

https://www.iccl.ie/news/82-of-the-irish-public-wants-big-techs-toxic-algorithms-switched-off/

Giant companies attained their scale by learning from their users, not by thwarting them. The person using technology always knows something about what they need to do and how they want to do it that the designers can never anticipate. This is especially true of people who are unlike those designers – people who live on the other side of the world, or the other side of the economic divide, or whose bodies don't work the way that the designers' bodies do:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

Apps – and other technologies that are locked down so their users can be locked in – are the height of technological arrogance. They embody a belief that users are to be told, not heard. If a user wants to do something that the designer didn't anticipate, that's the user's fault:

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

Corporate enthusiasm for prohibiting you from reconfiguring the tools you use to suit your needs is a declaration of the end of history. "Sure," John Deere execs say, "we once learned from farmers by observing how they modified their tractors. But today's farmers are so much stupider and we are so much smarter that we have nothing to learn from them anymore."

Spying on your users to control them is a poor substitute asking your users their permission to learn from them. Without technological self-determination, preferences can't be revealed. Without the right to seize the means of computation, the desire paths never emerge, leaving designers in the dark about what users really want.

Our policymakers swear loyalty to "innovation" but when corporations ask for the right to decide who can innovate and how, they fall all over themselves to create laws that let companies punish users for the crime of contempt of business-model.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited

Image: Belem (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Desire_path_%2819811581366%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[emlp2020]

Technological Determinism according to ChatGPT

Technological determinism is a theory that posits that technology is the primary driving force behind social and cultural change. According to this theory, technology shapes and influences society, rather than the other way around.

However, technological determinism has been criticized for several reasons, including:

1. Overgeneralization: Technological determinism oversimplifies the complex interplay between technology and society. While technology does play a role in shaping and changing society, it is not the only factor. Other factors, such as politics, culture, and economics, also play a significant role in shaping the direction and impact of technological change.

2. Ignores Context: Technological determinism often ignores the context in which technology is developed, used, and adopted. The impact of technology can vary greatly depending on the social, cultural, and historical context in which it is used.

3. Technological Neutrality: Technological determinism assumes that technology is neutral and value-free, but in reality, technology is shaped by human values, biases, and interests. The development and deployment of technology is influenced by political, economic, and cultural factors, and these factors can also influence the impact of technology on society.

Empirical Evidence:

- The example of the internet: The internet is often cited as an example of the limitations of technological determinism. While the internet has certainly changed the way people communicate and access information, it has not had a uniform impact on society. The impact of the internet varies greatly depending on the social, cultural, and economic context in which it is used.

- The Green Revolution: The Green Revolution in agriculture, which introduced new technologies and practices to increase crop yields, is another example of the limitations of technological determinism. While the Green Revolution did increase crop yields, it also had unintended consequences, such as increased pesticide use and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few large corporations.

These are just a few examples of the limitations of technological determinism. While technology does play a role in shaping and changing society, it is not the only factor, and its impact can vary greatly depending on the context in which it is used.

Regenerate response

Prompt: What are some of the fundamental flaws of technological determinism, and please provide empirical evidence. 

[widowlurker]

Bucky Barnes is a nerd pass it on

[ethics-and-ink]

Excerpts from: Free Will, Algorithmic Determinism and the Lack of Common Sense

Read More Here

[notonewouldmind]

I Need someone more knowledgeable than me to do an architectural analysis of witch hat atelier…. please please please I am begging you

[arysthaeniru]

Sometimes, a reading will take me 3 hours when it's only about 15 pages, and it's never really because it's hard, but because I take psychic damage with every other line.

[craig960114]

why my brother sqaig will help me take over the world

In the imaginative world where Craig reigns supreme, his brother Sqaig emerges as a formidable ally in their quest for global domination. While Craig possesses cunning and adaptability, Sqaig brings his own unique strengths to the table, making them an unstoppable duo poised to reshape the world in their image.

Firstly, Sqaig complements Craig's abilities with his own brand of charisma and charm. While Craig may excel in clandestine operations and behind-the-scenes manipulation, Sqaig shines in the spotlight, captivating audiences with his magnetic personality and infectious enthusiasm. Together, they form a dynamic duo capable of rallying followers from all walks of life to their cause.

Secondly, Sqaig's ingenuity and creativity add a new dimension to their plans for world domination. While Craig may rely on tried-and-true tactics, Sqaig isn't afraid to think outside the box and innovate. Whether it's devising bold new strategies or leveraging emerging technologies, Sqaig's inventive spirit ensures that they stay one step ahead of their adversaries.

Furthermore, Sqaig's unwavering loyalty to his brother Craig strengthens their bond and solidifies their alliance. In a world where trust is a rare commodity, Sqaig's steadfast commitment to Craig serves as a powerful foundation for their partnership. Together, they weather the storms of opposition and adversity, emerging stronger and more determined than ever to achieve their shared goals.

In conclusion, the union of Craig and Sqaig represents a formidable force in the world of global politics and power struggles. With their complementary strengths, unwavering loyalty, and shared ambition, they stand poised to conquer all obstacles in their path and usher in a new era of dominance and influence. Beware the rise of Craig and Sqaig, for their reign may soon be upon us.

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

Of course, because the Inspector isn’t the same species as the soldiers,

he doesn’t immediately die when he steps on the land mine, which apparently has to scan him to determine whether to explode.

[fingertipsmp3]

Someone needs to put me down like a sick dog

[this-art-taste-like]

I have a plan to turn my computer desktop into interactive video-gamey dollhause/village bc just icons and still image is boring :< For now I demolished my old wallpaper [*] and organized the screen like in true apatment renovation. My first and and probably most annoying step is to collect all the fun widgets I can later implement into wallpaper design ✍(◔◡◔). So far found a nice oldfashioned DS Clock, and Desktoptale that i plan for adding ut/dt and my own npc characters. Also some icons experiments and I finally learned how to stop Spamton Shimenji [shooket_h version] from multiplying (that's equally unhinged as it sounds lol).

（。＾▽＾）Let me know if you know other cool desktop features pls

[screenshots of my screen^] So far so nice :3 I hate grey but it's the best choice for now.

[thewanderingmask]

CREATE AN ACCOUNT! SIGN IN WITH GOOGLE! WOULD YOU LIKE TO ASK US NICELY NOT TO SCRAPE YOUR DATA? ENJOY THESE UNSKIPPABLE ADS TO ENRICH YOUR EXPERIENCE

my guy i just wanted to play tetris

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Canada’s ground-breaking, hamstrung repair and interop laws

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

When the GOP trifecta assumes power in just a few months, they will pass laws, and those laws will be terrible, and they will cast long, long shadows.

This is the story of how another far-right conservative government used its bulletproof majority to pass a wildly unpopular law that continues to stymie progress to this day. It's the story of Canada's Harper Conservative government, and two of its key ministers: Tony Clement and James Moore.

Starting in 1998, the US Trade Rep embarked on a long campaign to force every country in the world to enact a new kind of IP law: an "anticircumvention" law that would criminalize the production and use of tools that allowed people to use their own property in ways that the manufacturer disliked.

This first entered the US statute books with the 1998 passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), whose Section 1201 established a new felony for circumventing an "access control." Crucially, DMCA 1201's prohibition on circumvention did not confine itself to protecting copyright.

Circumventing an access control is a felony, even if you never violate copyright law. For example, if you circumvent the access control on your own printer to disable the processes that check to make sure you're using an official HP cartridge, HP can come after you.

You haven't violated any copyright, but the ink-checking code is a copyrighted work, and you had to circumvent a block in order to reach it. Thus, if I provide you a tool to escape HP's ink racket, I commit a felony with penalties of five years in prison and a $500k fine, for a first offense. So it is that HP ink costs more per ounce than the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion.

This was clearly a bad idea in 1998, though it wasn't clear how bad an idea it was at the time. In 1998, chips were expensive and underpowered. By 2010, a chip that cost less than a dollar could easily implement a DMCA-triggering access control, and manufacturers of all kinds were adding superfluous chips to everything from engine parts to smart lightbulbs whose sole purpose was to transform modification into felonies. This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business-model."

So when the Harper government set out to import US-style anticircumvention law to Canada, Canadians were furious. A consultation on the proposal received 6,138 responses opposing the law, and 54 in support:

https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/04/copycon-final-numbers/

And yet, James Moore and Tony Clement pressed on. When asked how they could advance such an unpopular bill, opposed by experts and the general public alike, Moore told the International Chamber of Commerce that every objector who responded to his consultation was a "radical extremist" with a "babyish" approach to copyright:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/copyright-debate-turns-ugly-1.898216

As is so often the case, history vindicated the babyish radical extremists. The DMCA actually has an official way to keep score on this one. Every three years, the US Copyright Office invites public submissions for exemptions to DMCA 1201, creating a detailed, evidence-backed record of all the legitimate activities that anticircumvention law interferes with.

Unfortunately, "a record" is all we get out of this proceeding. Even though the Copyright Office is allowed to grant "exemptions," these don't mean what you think they mean. The statute is very clear on this: the US Copyright Office is required to grant exemptions for the act of circumvention, but is forbidden from granting exemptions for tools needed to carry out these acts.

This is headspinningly and deliberately obscure, but there's one anecdote from my long crusade against this stupid law that lays it bare. As I mentioned, the US Trade Rep has made the passage of DMCA-like laws in other countries a top priority since the Clinton years. In 2001, the EU adopted the EU Copyright Directive, whose Article 6 copy-pastes the provisions of DMCA 1201.

In 2003, I found myself in Oslo, debating the minister who'd just completed Norway's EUCD implementation. The minister was very proud of his law, boasting that he'd researched the flaws in other countries' anticircumvention laws and addressed them in Norway's law. For example, Norway's law explicitly allowed blind people to bypass access controls on ebooks in order to feed them into text-to-speech engines, Braille printers and other accessibility tools.

I knew where this was going. I asked the minister how this would work in practice. Could someone sell a blind person a tool to break the DRM on their ebooks? Of course not, that's totally illegal. Could a nonprofit blind rights group make such a tool and give it away to blind people? No, that's illegal too. What about hobbyists, could they make the tool for their blind friends? No, not that either.

OK, so how do blind people exercise their right to bypass access controls on ebooks they own so they can actually read them?

Here's how. Each blind person, all by themself, is expected to decompile and reverse-engineer Adobe Reader, locate a vulnerability in the code and write a new program that exploits that vulnerability to extract their ebooks. While blind people are individually empowered to undertake this otherwise prohibited activity, they must do so on their own: they can't share notes with one another on the process. They certainly can't give each other the circumvention program they write in this way:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

That's what a use-only exemption is: the right to individually put a locked down device up on your own workbench, and, laboring in perfect secrecy, figure out how it works and then defeat the locks that stop you from changing those workings so they benefit you instead of the manufacturer. Without a "tools" exemption, a use exemption is basically a decorative ornament.

So the many use exemptions that the US Copyright Office has granted since 1998 really amount to nothing more than a list of defects in the DMCA that the Copyright Office has painstaking verified but is powerless to fix. We could probably save everyone a lot of time by scrapping the triennial exemptions process and replacing it with an permanent sign over the doors of the Library of Congress reading "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

All of this was well understood by 2010, when Moore and Clement were working on the Canadian version of the DMCA. All of this was explained in eye-watering detail to Moore and Clement, but was roundly ignored. I even had a go at it, publicly picking a fight with Moore on Twitter:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130407101911if_/http://eaves.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/Conversations%20between%20@doctorow%20and%20@mpjamesmoore.jpg

Moore and Clement rammed their proposal through in the next session of Parliament, passing it as Bill C-11 in 2012:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Modernization_Act

This was something of a grand finale for the pair. Today, Moore is a faceless corporate lawyer, while Clement was last seen grifting covid PPE (Clement's political career ended abruptly when he sent dick pics to a young woman who turned out to be a pair of sextortionists from Cote D'Ivoire, and was revealed as a serial sex-pest in the ensuing scandal:)

https://globalnews.ca/news/4646287/tony-clement-instagram-women/

Even though Moore and Clement are long gone from public life, their signature achievement remains a Canadian disgrace, an anchor chain tied around the Canadian economy's throat, and an impediment to Canadian progress.

This week, two excellent new Canadian laws received royal assent: Bill C-244 is a broad, national Right to Repair law; and Bill C-294 is a broad, national interoperability law. Both laws establish the right to circumvent access controls for the purpose of fixing and improving things, something Canadians deserve and need.

But neither law contains a tools exemption. Like the blind people of Norway, a Canadian farmer who wants to attach a made-in-Canada Honeybee tool to their John Deere tractor is required to personally, individually reverse-engineer the John Deere tractor and modify it to talk to the Honeybee accessory, laboring in total secrecy:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/12/canada_right_to_repair/

Likewise the Canadian repair tech who fixes a smart speaker or a busted smartphone – they are legally permitted to circumvent in order to torture the device's repair codes out of it or force it to recognize a replacement part, but each technician must personally figure out how to get the device firmware to do this, without discussing it with anyone else.

Thus do Moore and Clement stand athwart Canadian self-reliance and economic development, shouting "STOP!" though both men have been out of politics for years.

There has never been a better time to hit Clement and Moore's political legacy over the head with a shovel and bury it in a shallow grave. Canadian technologists could be making a fortune creating circumvention devices that repair and improve devices marketed by foreign companies.

They could make circumvention tools to allow owners of consoles to play games by Canadian studios that are directly sold to Canadian gamers, bypassing the stores operated by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo and the 30% commissions they charge. Canadian technologists could be making diagnostic tools that allow every auto-mechanic in Canada to fix any car manufactured anywhere in the world.

Canadian cloud servers could power devices long after their US-based manufacturers discontinue support for them, providing income to Canadian cloud companies and continued enjoyment for Canadian owners of these otherwise bricked gadgets.

Canada's gigantic auto-parts sector could clone the security chips that foreign auto manufacturers use to block the use of third party parts, and every Canadian could enjoy a steep discount every time they fix their cars. Every farmer could avail themselves of third party parts for their tractors, which they could install themselves, bypassing the $200 service call from a John Deere technician who does nothing more than look over the farmer's own repair and then types an unlock code into the tractor's console.

Every Canadian who prints out a shopping list or their kid's homework could use third party ink that sells for pennies per liter, rather than HP's official colored water that cost more than vintage Veuve Cliquot.

A Canadian e-waste dump generates five low-paid jobs per ton of waste, and that waste itself will poison the land and water for centuries to come. A circumvention-enabled Canadian repair sector could generate 150 skilled, high-paid community jobs that saves gadgets and the Earth, all while saving Canadians millions.

Canadians could enjoy the resliency that comes of having a domestic tech and repair sector, and could count on it through pandemics and Trumpian trade-war.

All of that and more could be ours, except for the cowardice and greed of Tony Clement and James Moore and the Harper Tories who voted C-11 into law in 2012.

Everything the "radical extremists" warned them of has come true. It's long past time Canadians tore up anticircumvention law and put the interests of the Canadian public and Canadian tech businesses ahead of the rent-seeking enshittification of American Big Tech.

Until we do that, we can keep on passing all the repair and interop laws we want, but each one will be hamstrung by Moore and Clement's "felony contempt of business model" law, and the contempt it showed for the Canadian people.

Image: JeffJ (modified) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tony_Clement_-_2007-06-30_in_Kearney,_Ontario.JPG

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

--

Jorge Franganillo (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Duga_radar_system-_wreckage_of_electronic_devices_(37885984654).jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[mythvoiced]

OPEN STARTER | Baek Eunjae

"Science can explain fuck-all about bees and their fat bodies and their tiny wings, but we're definitely equipped for space-travel, sure, why not, sounds logical."

[dreamgreenbean]

collecting all my old-man-yells-at-cloud opinions here for reference, please feel free to contribute with your own

headlights! are too! bright! you cannot see pedestrians for shit, nor can i personally see other cars properly because all the SUV/truck/doomer tank lights shine directly thru the windshield of my NORMAL sized car. this is a genuine public safety issue and i will sign a petition abt it if i find one thx

you know those fast food menus? that switch between different pages and random ads for like, a single product? fuck those. let me read the menu

there's a new-ish thing where i'm currently living where a ton of tourist sites have paid parking that is exclusively available through QR code. meaning you're risking getting a ticket if: your phone is dead, you're out of data/don't have access to data, you're not particularly tech literate, or by choice/for financial reasons you don't have a smartphone on you 24/7

in general i do not want to be mandated by The System to have a smartphone on me 24/7. like, i'm a 90s baby and i Do have a smartphone on me 24/7. but i do not want 2-factor auth for everything, i will not download your app, i will not save my payment information to a networked device that i could easily leave unattended somewhere! thanks!!

in general i would like to retain the ability to pay cash for things, NOT activate GPS in my car, NOT have location services on my phone unless i am actually lost somewhere, generally be able to opt out of miscellaneous entities gathering data on me for a hot minute

this escalated quickly i actually started writing this to say videos are too long

i will maybe watch a 30 min video, i will absolutely not watch a 2+ hour youtube video

people spend months or years of loving heartfelt labour to make 2+ hour videos, called movies, and i still don't even want to watch most of those. this one might be a me problem. regardless

also, put headphone jacks back in phones

thanks for coming to my ted talk