Eleanor Drage, ‘Frugal tech’ will build us all a better world:
Tech bros may want you to believe there is no point in making something new unless it is difficult, inaccessible and exclusionary. But technological innovation is about collaboration as much as it is about competition.
This paragraph is highly relevant as we see AI pushed into our tech platforms every day – whether it is “better” or “worse” isn’t the key point: the point is whether we have a say in how our technology develops around us, and whether this “us” is defined as a collection of individual, individualised consumers or as an alternative form of collective, a notion of a group that we have forgotten about.
For, since at least the 80s, the narrative has been that to be an individual is more powerful and more pleasing than to exist as a group – the idea that to depend on nobody (in the physical sense, replacing the body with the machine) is an easier goal than depending on others in your nearby vicinity.
To exist in collaboration is to empower both the group and the individual – as we’re only just starting to feel now (literally the last year or two, I’d posit), the social dislocation offered by screens-that-talk-to-us removes not just the ability to think critically, but/and so the potential to think up alternatives, and to rapidly assemble solutions when we suddenly face fundamental problems with the paradigm we thought we could trust.
I’ve struggled to hit any meaningful impact to cross this divide – between localised groups and the very meaning of technology, along with understanding and reshaping it – for as long as I’ve been involved, which seems like a shame. A tough decision then – do I double down on myself as an actor in this space, or is the struggle and its loss all just an inevitability?
On the flipside, I’ve always lived on the edge of tech – one of the reasons I haven’t been able to make more of this learning in a collaborative context is that keeping up with it (“progress”) takes a lot of energy in itself. Groups learn slowly, possibly too slowly to “compete” with mainstream technology. One option is to isolate the group from the wider world, but such hyperlocal-nationalism isn’t feasible, no matter how much solarpunk tales like to imagine communities hidden in the middle of a desert.
But can we offer more fragmented, micro-spaces that somehow combine technological (or technelogical) learning with a reflection and reconnection with our sense of self and our sense of combined identity? I like to think this is where some optimism lies, in building tiny, more joyful worlds we can retreat to when the main one gets too tough.
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