From my most recent piece in the The Globe and Mail about techlash and the release of a new wearable heads-up display.
“To brush off the public’s reaction to these issues as an anxiety to “be overcome” is nothing less than a paternalistic entreaty for us to turn a blind eye and trust in the tech powers that be. To label these pressing concerns as some sort of irrational techlash is to wipe them of their moral, ethical and civic motivations. We do not have a techlash problem; we have a tech problem.”
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Wonderful article; thank you for writing it! I found this insight especially valuable:
The tech philosopher Langdon Winner picks up where McLuhan left off by presenting a more developed theory of “technological somnambulism.” In Mr. Winner’s formulation, technologies are developed faster than we can possibly understand their full implications, and as long as consumers attempt to keep in step with the ever-accelerating march of innovation, they “willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence.”
Hopefully, we won’t waste another moment being sleeping beauties and will wake up to things as they really are–not as others want us to see them.