I have been getting into the ideas of critical theory with some great podcasts and videos. Stephen West from Philosophize This did an extensive 7 part series on The Frankfurt School, with a large focus on Herbert Marcuse. I especially liked his introductions of Marcuse’s works and the parts on culture industry. I also watched this interview Bryan Magee did with Marcuse in 1977 for his BBC program. In the interview Marcuse gives an overview of the thoughts of the members of the school and his involvement with the New Left movement. The whole discussion with Magee is great as can be expected from him and who also very critical. And lastly I listened to an episode of The Philosophers Zone titled “Are we enlightened?” that came out today by chance. In the short timespan of thirty minutes the podcast provides a fanstatic overview of critical theory and, as the title suggests, focuses on the theory’s roots against enlightement style thinking.
In an article from 1976 I came accross in the book the Social Shaping of Technology1, Ruth Schwartz Cowan looks at the introduction of technological appliances in the home and their effects on home work. Her analysis shows that the “industrialization of the home” was very different process from what we might suspect: that it would descrease the amount of work needed to be done by housewives. Rather the technologies seems to have shifted the work and contributed to changes in aspects of the work (such as the emotional aspects).
Today Mark Zuckerberg accounced his new vision for Facebook as a more privacy-focused company. The principal change he thinks should be to have interoperable end-to-end encryption for all of Facebook’s apps. Although this would be an interesting improvement to protect the communication, the links with law enforcement are worrying. Who is deciding what patterns identify “bad actors”, and how are they not influenced by governments? It also a way for Facebook to seem like they deem it appropriate to decide who are “bad actors”, which is equally worrying in my opinion.
A recent article from Kudina and Verbeek1 explores a different strategy to deal with the ‘Collingride dilemma’, a double-bind problem which roughly states that the impacts of new technology cannot easily be anticipated until the technology is developed, but that it hard to change the technology then. While in earlier stages it is easy to change the technology, but then we don’t know yet what it’s impact will be. The authors focus on the ethical variant of this dilemma which states that our value frameworks to evalue the technologies also change because of the technology:
Fantastic podcast from France Culture’s “Les chemins de la philosophie”. Professor Patrick Wotling discusses on the podcast the philosophy of Nietzche and how forgetting can be a condition for the well functioning of social life:
I quite enjoyed this series from Gizmodo where reported Kashmir Hill tries to not use any of the five big tech companies. It’s especially revealing and perhaps lesser known how important they are on infrastructure of the internet. For example, Amazon hosts a large amount of websites, making it almost impossible to avoid Amazon completely.
Hettie O’Brien writes in an article on The New Statesman on the fantasies of tech solutionism for Irish border:
The logic here is peak Silicon Valley: technology vacates policies of their political intent, offering practical solutions that we can converge on regardless of political differences.
Today I learned that there are standards in the patterns of the bumpy parts on pavements ("tactile paving") that help visually impaired people move around. Apparently there are different patterns that have their own meaning, such as when there are steps ahead or near a platform. Check out this video by Tom Scott that focuses on the patterns used in British streets. The standard they use (“Guidance on the use of Tactile Paving Surfaces”) can be found here.
Bloomberg Newsweek made a nice three part video series on the Chinese city Shenzhen. In the series Ashlee Vance gives a balanced view of how this city has grown rapidly over the last 40 years, showing both postive and negative sides of this “futuristic metropolis”. The full three episodes are part of the “Hello World” series and you can watch them here.
Can our phone use shape how we eat our food? A funny article from The Guardian provides some examples of devices to “tailor the dining experience around our phone-centric lifestyles”.