People Need to be More Critical of their Tech Environment

I'm sure someone out there, either in the past (near or far) or in the present, has written about the need for critique of establishments that you work and live within. My personal turn came from working at the pink mustache company. I was convinced that by working at that place, I'd get closer to working on things that'd help expand transit for everyone. As someone who can't drive without supervision (for now), this was something I would have loved to see. That and getting $100 in credits every month was great. The RSU-backed Nesquik smoothie was being chugged. It didn't help that I also have a deep interest in computing from a small age — something that's changed so many parts of my personal and public life.

This brings me to the point of critique. It's not hard to veer hard into being a "loud" megaphone that echoes what another outlet is saying; to turn into a grandstanding demagogue of sorts. However, these folks are easy to clock with the understanding that commerical social media is driven by algorithmic amplification and traffic capital. This is more of an issue if you're not someone who gets a lot of their information from the Web (although broadcast television isn't any better — it's mostly white labeled contracted studios that aren't accountable to the populous that they broadcast to). That doesn't dismiss the need for us to begin the work of holding the institutions and organizations we exist under (mostly by force).

Something Paris Marx wrote in his self-critique includes a book I have yet to read:

For a while I felt a tension between my enthusiasm for technology and my opposition to capitalism — how could I be fascinated by products and keynote presentations from a massive company that charged premium prices on products made by poorly paid workers in Chinese factories, yet also believe in the overthrow of the system that created those conditions? I found my answer in fully automated luxury communism (FALC).

Ironically, the idea of FALC is something that was predicted by J. M. Keynes to have happened in the 1930s: that the advent and acceleration of technology and its outputs would reduce the amount of time we'd need to work. Instead, the consumption economy (driven by business — not consumers, mind you) took this and pushed it such that more needs to be produced solely because we can. And now we have the iPhone 16 and Samsung A30. Tech journalism became no different from what the circulars you get in your mailbox every Sunday — a bunch of ads and prophecies of the "hottest", "newest" and "greatest". It's nigh impossible to find this perspective from places like The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Verge, TechCrunch, ArsTechnica, CNET, Wired or any of the tech or tech-adjacent outlets that exist. To tell a massive company that they need to stop making shit is tantamount to getting sued with libel (it seems).

So, the task's left up to us. "Us" is meant to be the "consumers", the people who end up buying this stuff. Sometimes we have no choice due to the production of things to die — and at times, we fall for marketing that tells us that if we spend more, we're investing in longer lifespans of our devices. This and so many other things — like generative AI being the next frontier of art, virtual reality being a great replacement for actual reality and the notion that Facebook can launder its reputation to be an ethical social networking company aren't only not true — they're marketing lines. We, as people who either use tech a lot, work in tech or help develop it, need to be the pushback that this industry is unwilling to provide for itself.

This began for me as an response to organizing and being more involved with people in organizing. However, I don't believe it to be a requirement. Paris Marx has a page on Bookshop of books they've collected on such a topic. There's plenty of documentaries that you can watch on the topic like this one (ironically) in partnership with Microsoft about racial bias and its ties to Jim Crow, or Coded Bias on PBS and Aaron Swartz's life to start. Reading and watching helps to reorient our perspectives that are saturated by media's obsession with propping up tech. But it also comes to adopting different approaches to computing that can help bring about a cultural revolution that makes the critique no longer necessary.