There Is No Such Thing as Bad Technology...

...but there are bad people, with bad intent, using technology to enslave and control us. Take the mongrel dog running DOGE, for example.

"Captain Armpit-Smell" bought a social media network that, while it was struggling financially, had way many more, and way more diverse users, than it does now. It has become, pretty much exclusively a social media mouthpiece for "The Captain" and his fanbois. And those fanbois are nearly all "bois." The news outlets and journalists who still primarily microblog there, over any other "social" medium are abrogating their responsibilities as reporters by not also using the fediverse. The original microblog is dead, long live the original microblog - all the while ignoring the more diverse, larger audience for editorial content audience on the diversely managed, as well as diversely populated Fediverse.

Then there's the problem of the centralised news outlet in a decentralised, yet commercially tribalised, world - uninformed debate. The algorithm is tuned to give only the most irritating response, because we give away the most information about ourselves in a our negative reactions. Social media, all social media, sets out to push our buttons. Clickbait headlines earn more viewers than rational headlines because they drive us to comment negatively and give away very precise data about our most malleable emotions and responses to those emotions.

Then there is the preposterous levels of our reliance on social media, rather than person to person connections. I'm not a sociable person but, since escaping facebook, I find personal, bricks and mortar shopping actually enjoyable and rewarding. Any shopping for a thing needed for day-to-day living, projects, work needs has an element of chore about it, but I find reward in looking at the websites of places near me for an option or three, then going to those places to compare the options. Product in hand, how it feels. How it looks, "May I turn it on and see the screen." This is real convenience.

"Mind if I try it out?" is a mighty question. You can't ask it online. No, really, there is no try before you buy. No real one.

The other problem with life online, E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops." One hundred years ago, Forster predicted this very world we live-in. The descriptions of the tech have me envisaging props design like Terry Gilliam's "Brazil," but the lives, the characters living them, are us! We today!

I've written about "The Machine Stops" here, back in January. I raise it again because The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has a really good opinion piece that echos my above-mentioned blog post of earlier this year, only in more detail, calling on scientific experience in the relevant fields. Please head over to AI is changing our future, by Toby Walsh, Chief Scientist at the UNSW AI Institute, Australia. Skynet is not our doom, we're perfectly good at engineering that ourselves, and are way ahead of the "Terminator" franchise already.