79 Theses on Technology

So here is a selection of the 79 theses on Technology

o    Everything begins with attention.

o    It is vital to ask, “What must I pay attention to?”

o    It is vital to ask, “What may I pay attention to?”

o    It is vital to ask, “What must I refuse attention to?”

o    To “pay” attention is not a metaphor: Attending to something is an economic exercise, an exchange with uncertain returns.

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o    Useful strategies of resistance require knowledge of technology’s origin stories.

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o    Blessed are they who strive to practice commentary as a legitimate, serious genre of responsiveness to others’ thoughts.

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o    Our current electronic technologies make competent servants, annoyingly capricious masters, and tragically incompetent gods.

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o    This epidemic of forgetting where algorithms come from is the newest version of “I for one welcome our new insect overlords.”

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o    Jaron Lanier: “The Turing test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart.”

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o    Everyone should sometimes write by hand, to recall what it’s like to have second thoughts before the first ones are completely recorded.

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o    On the internet nothing disappears; on the internet anything can disappear.

 79 Theses on Technology. For Disputation. | The Infernal Machine.