Technology Kills--Team Human, The Techno-Dissenters Meet

The Washington Post reported today on a conference held last month at the New School (NYC) by digital dissenters who are unhappy with the way the tech revolution has played out, Technoskeptics' Objection Growing Louder. Here are a few interesting quotes from the article:

"Lanier later wrote two books lamenting the way everyone essentially works for Facebook, Google, etc., by feeding material into those central processors and turning private lives into something corporations can mon­etize. He’d like to see people compensated for their data in the form of micro payments."

"Rushkoff, whose new book is titled  Rocks at the Google Bus..“Where do humans fit into this new economy?” he said. “Really not as creators of value, but as the content. We are the content. We are the data. We are the media. As you use a smartphone, your smartphone gets smarter, but you get dumber.”

The cycle of a new technology improving human life and then mutating into a force that controls is as old as time itself. Robert Ornstein and James Burke in The Axemaker's Gift examine the rise of technology throughout history. They show  how each new invention brought improvement in the quality of life, but eventually delivered greater power to control to the elites that that dwarfed the initial benefits of the new technology.

The Internet is only the newest manifestation of the technological control cycle as detailed in the Axemaker's Gift. Do you remember the early days of the Internet in the nineties? Before business embraced it, before hackers, before government spying.....before??????????