Affecting Technologies, Machining Intelligences: Silicon Valley and the English Language

tags

User-Centered Design

Notes

“We build human-centered tools that scale”

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U.S. computing culture right now seems to be a half-digested mix of old countercultures and new ones

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a way of thinking that infuses a constructionist, worldbuilding spirit into the recent base of critique—a new culture of computing that I call “supercritical.”

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“scale” is an idea that you can find in actual lines of code.

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capture of 1970s U.S. computing counterculture into the private U.S. tech monopolies

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the human paying the designer’s bill is the one most likely prioritized

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Who would dare argue against “humanity,” “the human,” and the “humane”?

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“We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.”

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What scales? Families don’t scale. (How well would your family picnic do with 10000x more parents or kids?) But cafeterias, call centers, and jails all scale because they isolate workers from each other.

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Diverse, transformative relationships don’t scale.

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where critique tears down ideas then falls into quiescence (Latour, 2004), a language and culture of “supercritique” would generate more ideas than it destroys.

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“critical technical practice”

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Philip Agre

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speaking not about building “tools” but about maintaining “ecosystems”

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