Or to put it another way, we've reached the point where any new technology that's being pushed (EVs, AI, cryptocurrency, NFTs, etc) is more likely to just make some lucky self-aggrandizing moron into a billionaire than it is to make your life better in any meaningful way.

In fact, it's more likely to make your life worse.

@malcircuit

My feelings exactly. I care less and less about the newest and shiniest for an ever-shrinking percentage. Show me something that improves the lives of millions, by distributing the benefits of technology more broadly.

@malcircuit absolutely and without hesitation.

The pieces of technology that make my life the best are also often the simplest, the ones least marketable and least open to being marketed by. That's incompatible with modern economics and government.

@malcircuit The tech we do have is mostly misused for capitalist purposes. And the prices of tech are often inflated for the same reasons.

There's also an education hurdle. People don't recognize the value of tech because they've only been shown the capitalist uses of tech rather than the utilitarian ones. Also, they are more easily engaged with "prettier" and simpler tools rather than powerful and empowering tools.

Like, for example, a federated social media network, say

@malcircuit

The people in control of mass production - the only reason that any of it is attainable - want to continually revise every bit of technology to keep us buying more of it. Sometimes it even offers some useful improvement as a lure. The promise of mass production was replication and cost savings, however, which has been largely up-ended. The One Percent continues to exploit and benefit by many orders of magnitude more than what trickles down.

What to do about it?

@malcircuit “The future has arrived — it's just not evenly distributed yet”

The type of tech we’re still in short supply of is tech that disempowers the outsize haves and redistributes it to the havenots.

@[email protected] I think you echoed many of my thoughts. I used to be a real techie, interested in everything and getting excited about the new developments.

Now new developments just make me sad. We have no intention of creating a better world for everyone, instead the new tech always benefits the people who are already well off.

@malcircuit the way I see it, is that every time something (soft or hardware) useful is created, "new tech" is created.

Stopping to care about "new tech", for me, means accepting the current state. Never moving out of that, forever stuck in this current state of big-tech-dictates.

I refuse that and try to keep caring about new tech. For example, without "new tech" there wouldn't be mastodon, only Twitter.

@malcircuit One in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a wage.

R. Buckminster Fuller

@malcircuit yep how I feel about the AI hype lately. folks not focused on solving one of our top pre-existing probs. but at best making them worse or adding new ones

I believe climate and democracy threats are the top. and deserve lion's share of talent and resources. and they likely dont need fundamentally new tech. just big political changes and social shifts. to extent software engineering for example, can help with that, great, folks should try

@malcircuit

We exist in a post-scarcity world. We can feed, clothe, and house everyone on the planet, & have a thriving economy with plenty for everyone. The twelve people who run the world, the very richest people on the face of the planet, see that fact as a threat to their ability to own everything & everyone. To step out of this distopian nightmare of capitalistic slavery and into a brighter world, we need to throw off the shackles of traditional economics. Embrace the Zero Value Economy.

@malcircuit If we worked to make people's lives better, tech would also move in that direction.

Case and point: the coronavirus vaccine. For a brief moment in time, making people's lives better was also in the best interest of the profit motive and the world's fastest developed vaccines (plural!) We're developed.

Imagine if that were put into practice for housing, or mental health.

Imagine if the tracking tech we have were used to get people mental health attention, instead of to push products.

Tech isn't the problem, it's capitalism.