Langston Winner's discussion was powerful and even emotional!
Power is centralized!
The few talk and the many listen!
There are barriers between social classes!
The world is hierarchically structured!
The good things are distributed unequally!
Women and men have different kinds of competence!
One's life is open to continual inspection!
Winner is suggesting that contemporary technology is the spokesperson for the above principles. Incidentally, the above principles amount to fascism!
That sounds a bit paran . . .
1- On every block in my neighborhood there are street cameras.
2-The US government is allowed to spy on US citizens
3- The US government can deny US citizens constitutionally protected jurisprudence by simply labeling them "enemy combatants"
4- My phone has a GPS navigator that can pinpoint me anywhere in the world
5- Principles of capitalism state that its OK to replace people with machines because eventually those people will get better paying jobs doing something? else.
6- I know dozens of people that have found themselves in "Ms. Garret" type situations where they are forced to defend themselves against a machine.
7- George Bush stole an election, started a war, erased the surplus (that Clinton left) and created a huge deficit, and made his buddies at Haliburton, Northrop, and Lockheed (not to mention the oil companies) super rich(er)
8- As I discussed last week in the "new human habitat" discussion, technology is definitely creating conditions where humans will have to accept the world as technology crafts it. Utilizing Winner's suggestion of analyzing the relationship from the 'perspective of technology', the new human habitat becomes an overseer and human beings become prisoners.
YEAH, fascism, that sounds about right!
(This class is becoming scary. Tell me I am reading too much into this!)
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1 comment:
Firstly, I really enjoyed reading your post. This confluence of surveillance technologies and state power does, potentially, pose an enormous problem. We'll come back to it later in the course.
On fascism, personally I'd prefer to restrict this term to its narrow political sense as evoking a particular kind of right wing nationalism emerging in response to contradictions in social developments in a particular historical epoch. I don't find it helpful as a description of the maladies of contemporary societies.
Of course, you are free to disagree!
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