Same Old

tags

Innovation as Conservative Force

Notes

a robot maid takes care of most of the housework, but Jane Jetson retains the role and identity of the housewife.

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These technofutures regurgitate essentially the same office or kitchen as in decades past, and the same kinds of users and workers to inhabit them.

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research centers were each pushing their own variant, such as Phillips’ “ambient intelligence” and IBM’s “pervasive computing.” One notable variant was “ubiquitous computing,” or ubicomp. Popularized by Xerox PARC technologist Mark Weiser,

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Like the modern user who learns to “set” their face to unlock their phone, or to speak just so for the multi-choice maze of an automated customer service call, what is striking is not so much the machine’s humanness, but the lengths we are forced to go to become compatible with the machine.

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Apple’s celebrated designer Jony Ive: “When something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical.”

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what unites these eras is a vision of the society in which they function.

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This office of the future offers momentary injections of speed, but otherwise doesn’t look much different from the office of the past, or of today.

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When it is the only future we have known, it becomes harder to ask why.

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While the truly automated future never quite arrives, the dream is perpetually tended by an ever-increasing population of badly paid, and badly treated ghost workers.

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the problem isn’t simply the technical repetition, but the fact that each new generation helps fossilize and retrench the associated social relations.

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these technologies did not necessarily result in a net reduction of women’s housework hours. Instead, the new electrical machines were often replacing the paid labor of domestic workers.

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The reduction of certain kinds of housework was accompanied by rising expectations elsewhere. Childcare norms, for instance, became far more demanding in the postwar years,

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The persistent technological fantasy of frictionlessness harbors, at heart, capital’s need to pretend that certain kinds of work doesn’t really exist.

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the promise of automation provides crucial cover for outsourcing, underpaying, and otherwise externalizing the real costs of technology to the most vulnerable workers

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Artificial intelligence, now inflated to describe a wide variety of systems that are neither artificial nor intelligent, provides recycled fantasies of instant consumption and self-driving cars that reprise the dream of convenience as freedom. AI also forms Big Tech’s route to maintaining and strengthening its supply of military funding by reviving Cold War narratives of a technological arms race.

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honeymoon objectivity: the incitement to fall in love with each new technology just as we break it off with the previous one, maintaining a stagnant cycle in which the next great invention, the next transgressive genius, again promises to deliver a utopia of frictionlessness and objective certainty.

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this recycling of technofutures is fundamentally a conservative force, in which a highly limited selection of technical benchmarks, use-cases, and social relations are dressed up over and over again, with no thought to whether they’re worth preserving, or what could be built in their place.

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