A certain brand of artistic criticism and commentary has become surprisingly rare
Good stuff from Erik Hoel about, effectively, the need for more cultural criticism around the use of technology in society. Any article that appropriately quotes Neil Postman is alright by me, and the art (included here) from Alexander Naughton which accompanies the article? Wow.
[L]ately some decisions have been explicitly boundary-pushing in a shameless “Let’s speedrun to a bad outcome” way. I think most people would share the worry that a world where social media reactivity stems mainly from bots represents a step toward dystopia, a last severing of a social life that has already moved online. So news of these sorts of plans has come across to me about as sympathetically as someone putting on their monocle and practicing their Dr. Evil laugh in public.
Why the change? Why, especially, the brazenness?
Admittedly, any answer to this question will ignore some set of contributing causal factors. Here in the early days of the AI revolution, we suddenly have a bunch of new dimensions along which to move toward a dystopia, which means people are already fiddling with the sliders. That alone accounts for some of it.
But I think a major contributing cause is a more nebulous cultural reason, one outside tech itself, in that a certain brand of artistic criticism and commentary has become surprisingly rare. In the 20th century a mainstay of satire was skewering greedy corporate overreach, a theme that cropped up across different media and genres, from film to fiction. Many older examples are, well, obvious.
Source: The Intrinsic Perspective