The Tendencies of Technology from Forum Network | Soapbox Podcast Podcast

The recent changes that technology has made to books, reading, and the way we relate to each other are unprecedented and transformational. Tech guru Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants; digital visionary Nicholas Negroponte; David Kirkpatrick, founder of Techonomy and author of The Facebook Effect; and The New York Time's Nick Bilton, author of I Live in the Future and Here's How It Works, discuss technology and its impact on how we live. Moderated by public radio's John Hockenberry. Listen to the podcast.

Douglas Rushkoff: Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

From the Daily Kos: As we shuffle in this morning, we're all gathering on a plane of electrons, held together by... well, for most of us it might as well be library paste and fairy dust. But hey, who needs to understand how all this technical stuff works? After all, you don't need to know how a television works to catch Law & Order: Yet Another. You don't need to know how a combustion engine works to drive your car to work. Why should you need to know anything about the programming behind the pixels just to get around the web? Because, as Douglas Rushkoff reminds us in this slim volume, the web is different. It's both medium and content. It delivers us to work, delivers our entertainment, hosts our conversation, and more often than not, shapes our opinions. It's medium and message, highway, vehicle, post office, confidant, and huckster. We don't just put our ideas into the web, we also draw ideas out. And the difference in being able to place messages in the medium, and realizing how the medium shapes the message, is the difference between tossing a pebble into water and digging a canal. This is not a coffee maker you're using, and the web is not the Sunday paper. What you do in here can be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. We like to think that we're old hands at the information age, but what Douglas Rushkoff shows is that those who march into the web thinking that knowledge of the outside world will be enough to use this new conduit, have been sadly mistaken over and over. Retail powerhouses in the brick & mortar world find that not only are they unable to easily leverage the web to their advantage, simply putting their prices online makes it easier for companies that only exist in this new universe to quick trump their prices and take their customers. Newspapers find that their ability to aggregate information can't keep up with tools available to their (former) readers. Politicians find that rather than giving them a simple super-phone-bank-money-extractor, operating in the web can also mean being mired in a bog of electronic overload and inaction. What's the difference between being able to operate in the web, and being able to thrive there? The difference is in being able to understand the how and why of this new world. In ten chapters or commands, Douglas Rushkoff lays out how to live in this new world. Some of this advice will seem straightforward, some of it will need explanation, and some of it will seem more than a little counterintuitive. But all of it is delivered with verve and insight that makes you rethink your interactions on the web. Are you driving your life here, or only a passenger? If you want to get your hands on the wheel, this book is a good place to start.





From Wikipedia: Douglas Rushkoff (born 18 February 1961) is an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist and documentarian. He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture, and his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems. Rushkoff is most frequently regarded as a media theorist, and known for coining terms and concepts including viral media (or media virus), digital native, and social currency. He has written ten books on media, technology, and culture. He wrote the first syndicated column on cyberculture for The New York Times Syndicate, as well as regular columns for The Guardian of London, Arthur, Discover, and the online magazines Daily Beast, TheFeature.com and meeting industry magazine One+. Douglas Rushkoff currently teaches in the Media Studies department at The New School University in Manhattan. He has previously lectured at the ITP at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and taught a class called Narrative Lab. He also has taught online for the MaybeLogic Academy. Rushkoff graduated from Princeton University in 1983. He moved to Los Angeles and completed a Master of Fine Arts in Directing from the California Institute of the Arts. Later Douglas Rushkoff took up a post-graduate fellowship from the American Film Institute. He is currently a PhD candidate at Utrecht University's New Media Program, writing a dissertation on new media literacies. Rushkoff emerged in the early 1990s as active member of the cyberpunk movement, developing friendships and collaborations with people including Timothy Leary, RU Sirius, Paul Krassner, Robert Anton Wilson, Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna, Genesis P-Orridge, Richard Metzger, Grant Morrison, Mark Pesce, Erik Davis, and other writers, artists and philosophers interested in the intersection of technology, society and culture.





In December of 2010, The Jewish Week (New York) asked the author this: In your book “Program or be Programmed,” you write that one either figuratively creates the software “or you will be the software.” Which sounds like a new way of saying that a person without vision, who lacks guiding principles, is spiritually lost. Is the Jewish community creating its own software? Who is, who isn’t? The author replied: I think too many Jews are more comfortable thinking of Torah and Talmud as the word of God, as sacred and locked down, rather than mutable creations of human beings. They would rather be driven by Torah than partner with Torah. Today, the Reconstructionist community seems the best at maintaining this awareness — that Judaism is a process. But I’m finding many Modern Orthodox practicing in highly evolved and open-minded ways; many Reform shuls engaging with Torah and totally rethinking their approach to their after-school programs; many Conservative synagogues revitalized by embracing gay and lesbian constituencies.





In September of 2010, Douglas Rushkoff wrote "Why Johnny Can't Program: A New Medium Requires A New Literacy" for the Huffington Post, in which he said this: Ask any kid what Facebook is for and he'll tell you it's there to help him make friends. What else could he think? It's how he *does* make friends. He has no idea the real purpose of the software, and the people coding it, is to monetize his relationships. He isn't even aware of those people, the program, or their purpose. The kids I celebrated in my early books as "digital natives" capable of seeing through all efforts of big media and marketing have actually proven *less* capable of discerning the integrity of the sources they read and the intentions of the programs they use. If they don't know what the programs they are using are even for, they don't stand a chance to use them effectively. They are less likely to become power users than the used. Amazingly, America - the birthplace of the Internet - is the only developed nation that does not teach programming in its public schools. Sure, some of our schools have elected to offer "computer" classes, but instead of teaching programming, these classes almost invariably teach programs: how to use Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, or any of the other commercial software packages used in the average workplace. We teach our kids how to get jobs in today's marketplace rather than how to innovate for tomorrow's. Just last year, while researching a book on America's digital illiteracy, I met with the Air Force General then in charge of America's cybercommand. He said he had plenty of new recruits ready and able to operate drones or other virtual fighting machines - but no one capable of programming them, or even interested in learning how. He wasn't even getting recruits who were ready to begin basic programming classes. Meanwhile, he explained to me, colleges in Russia, China, and even Iran were churning out an order of magnitude more programmers than universities in the US. It is only a matter of time, he said - a generation at most - until our military loses its digital superiority.

Sherry Turkle: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

In January 2011, Jessica Bennett wrote “The promise of technology is connectedness. But could modern gadgetry be making us lonelier than ever?” for Newsweek Magazine. The advantage to all that gadgetry, of course, is connectedness: email lets us respond on the go, and we are in touch with more people during more hours of the day than at any other time in history. But is it possible we're more lonely than ever, too? That's what MIT professor Sherry Turkle observes in her new book, Alone Together, a fascinating portrait of our changing relationship with technology. The result of nearly 15 years of study (and interviews with hundreds of subjects), Turkle details the ways technology has redefined our perceptions of intimacy and solitude—and warns of the perils of embracing such pseudo-techno relationships in place of lasting emotional connections.

“The reason that I put the robot part first, even though it hasn't really arrived yet, is that with robots, there's this new diction of "alive enough." This generation of kids has something very specific in mind when they say that things are alive enough: "[The robot] is alive enough to be a friend — it's alive enough to do X with me." They're willing to move the whole discussion of what it means to be alive off of the philosophical terrain and onto the pragmatic terrain, where things become alive only for various purposes.”

- Sherry Turkle, author of the book: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“People would rather text than talk, because they can control how much time it takes. They can control where it fits in their schedule. When you have the amount of velocity and volume [of communication] that we have in our lives, we have to control our communications very dramatically. So controlling relationships becomes a major theme in digital communication. And that's what sometimes makes us feel alone together — because controlled relationships are not necessarily relationships in which you feel kinship.”

- Sherry Turkle, author of the book: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

In January 2011, Meredith Melnick wrote “Is Technology Making Us Lonelier?” for Time Magazine. Digital communication is so pervasive that most of us don't even bother to question its role in society. That's not the case with Sherry Turkle, who has tracked the way we interact with computers and artificial intelligence since the 1970s. Founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, Turkle has written a new book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, that asks a simple question: Do digital methods of communication connect us the way interaction in the real world does? In late December, Turkle sat with TIME to discuss robot puppies, teen texting and what "full attention" means in an age of smart phones.

“But many of these same ideas no longer seem abstract or esoteric when you immerse yourself in life on the Internet. For example, the idea that you are constituted by and through language is not an abstract idea if you're confronted with the necessity of creating a character in a MUD. You just have to do it. Your words are your deeds, your words are your body. And you feel these word-deeds and this word-body quite viscerally. Similarly, the idea of multiplicity as a way of thinking about identity is concretized when someone gets an Internet account, is asked to name five "handles" or nicknames for his activities on the system, and finds himself "being" Armani-boy in some online discussions, but Motorcycle-man, Too-serious, Aquinas, and Lipstick in others.”

- Sherry Turkle, author of the book: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

Kevin Kelly: What Technology Wants

In June 1863, Samuel Butler wrote (but signed “Cellarius”) “Darwin among the Machines” for The Press, a newspaper in Christchurch, New Zealand. The article raised the possibility that machines were a kind of “mechanical life” undergoing constant evolution, and that eventually machines might supplant humans as the dominant species. The article ended, urging this notion that “war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race.” This article, along with later writings by Butler on “machine evolution,” was probably largely satirical in intent, although he may have been using these fanciful writings to allude to or explore deeper philosophical issues, such as the question of whether biological life and evolution can be explained in purely mechanical terms.

“We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.”

- “Cellarius,” Darwin among the Machines

“Ted Kaczynski, the convicted bomber who blew up dozens of technophilic professionals, was right about one thing: technology has its own agenda. The technium is not, as most people think, a series of individual artifacts and gadgets for sale. Rather, Kaczynski, speaking as the Unabomber, argued that technology is a dynamic holistic system. It is not mere hardware; rather it is more akin to an organism. It is not inert, nor passive; rather the technium seeks and grabs resources for its own expansion. It is not merely the sum of human action, but in fact it transcends human actions and desires. I think Kaczynski was right about these claims.”

- Kevin Kelly, “The Unabomber Was Right,” chapter from What Technology Wants

In November 2010, Jerry Coyne wrote “Better All the Time” for The New York Times. The thesis of Kevin Kelly’s bold new book begins with its title. How can technology — an inanimate collection of human inventions — want anything? According to Kevin Kelly, a professional tech-watcher and former editor of Wired magazine, it’s because technology is like a living organism, animated by the same evolutionary forces that resulted, over eons, in the human brain. Moreover, for Kevin Kelly, the whole process has been progressive and predictable: the eventual appearance of the BlackBerry was immanent in the Big Bang. Kevin Kelly argues convincingly that this expansion of technology is beneficial. Technology creates choice — compare the supermarket’s shelves with the pantry of a colonial farm — and therefore enhances our potential for self-realization. No longer tied to the land, we can become, in principle, what we want to become. He sees evolution — both biological and technological — as an inexorable and predictable process; if life were to begin again on Earth, he argues, we’d see not only the re-evolution of humans, but humans who would invent pretty much the same stuff. To support his claims, Kevin Kelly describes parallel inventions on different isolated continents (the blowgun and the abacus, for example), and the presence of near-simultaneous inventions in modern times (the light bulb was invented at least two dozen times).

“The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.”

- Theodore J. Kaczynski, Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski, a.k.a. "The Unabomber"

In October 2010, Susan Jane Gilman wrote a review of the Kevin Kelly book for NPR’s All Things Considered. The provocative new Kevin Kelly book, What Technology Wants, claims that technology is an extension of the human body — not "of our genes, but of our minds." Everything that humans have thought of and produced over time — which Kelly dubs "the technium" — has followed, shaped and become integrated into human evolution — so much so, in fact, that it's now a part of evolution itself. As such, Kelly argues, the goal of the technium — its "want," if you will — is to foster progress ... human betterment ... and even a portrait of God. While Kelly stops short of arguing that a MacBook, an opera or Hammurabi's Code are the equivalent of, say, a live chicken, he comes close. "However you define life, its essence does not reside in material forms like DNA, tissue or flesh," he writes, "but in the intangible organization of energy and information contained in those material forms." Because the technium is all about organizing energy and information, it, too, is an evolving form of life — beholden to the forces of the cosmos.

P. W. Singer: Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century

Public Radio International recently had the author on its "How We Got Here" program. The story and segment was called, "Drones – The New Normal." The webpage for this story says this: P.W. Singer, the author of Wired for War tells us about the use of drones (robotic, or unmanned, or remotely-piloted aircraft) — in war. He says the fact that pilots can engage in war from thousands of miles away and without risk to themselves represents a fundamental change in the nature of warfare as it has been waged for thousands of years. He also likens the development of the drone to the development of the airplane itself–that each followed similar stages of evolution. As for the political, legal, and ethical dilemmas they pose–he points out that the technology is moving faster than the ability of human organizations to keep up with the implications. Just as it has been with the computer. This week’s How We Got Here is full of insights from a scholar who says flying robots are no longer the futuristic stuff of science fiction; they are the new normal. Download the podcast to that show, here. See also: Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, Updated Edition (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs).



The Santa Barbara Independent recently mentioned the book and author in a piece titled, "A Kinder, Friendlier Predator? The Risks and Rewards of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles."

P. W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and 21st Century Conflict, told me in an email that he believes the proliferation of UAVs in civilian life will outstrip the legal framework for dealing with their ramifications just as has happened with militarized UAVs. (There are no clauses in the Hague Conventions that address unpiloted, missile-launching airplanes, cruising through Asia, controlled by operators in a trailer outside of Las Vegas.) The civilian example Singer offered comes from law enforcement: “I recall a conversation I had with a federal District Court judge who talked about the deep questions of privacy and probable cause raised by a system that carried out unblinking observation from above. A law enforcement agency for instance could easily and even inadvertently gain info that it previously needed a warrant for. He predicted we’d soon have some Supreme Court cases on this as the technology began to be used more and more.”

Read that article here. See also: Military Robots (High Interest Books), Ultimate Weapons: Robotic Warriors.