“You can’t “protest” against Taskrabbit, against Uber, against drones. The conditions of the conversation are binary: you’re either in, or you’re out. Ultracapitalism, ultrahistory, a complete system.
Taskrabbit, Uber, drones, high-frequency trading, austerity, and this: the natural endpoint of algorithmic capitalism. Cheap humans. Just-in-time people. A generation inside the machine, so drunk and indebted that it will be their lasting fame. An airbnb of the flesh. Impersonate the machine.
Impersonating the Machine | booktwo.org (via iamdanw)
This nicely sums something that has started to bother me in today’s tech industry—an entitled, Ayn Rand-ian belief in the right to “disruption” as an absolute value, a tendency to paint authorities who question the methods of brash entrepreneurs as corrupt obstructionists, and an arrogant insistence on the ability of technology to solve society’s problems. I love ideas that revolutionize industries by freeing up excess capacity in the world, but there’s something a bit creepy and unsettling about how little some seem to be concerned about the human factors of what they’re building. I was only half joking on Twitter when I said “We’ll know the “Sharing Economy” has truly arrived when “Law & Order: SVU” does their inevitable Airbnb/TaskRabbit/Lyft episode.”
(via iamdanw)
