Results for “James Williams”

The concentration of power in technology corporations is a moral and political problem that we simply don't have a precedent for. More people use Facebook than speak English for example, so the implications of Facebook, as just one platform, are at the scale of language itself.

Digital technologies are now an unavoidable part of the infrastructure of life and society, and we have the capacity to design them in ways that promote, understand and respect people's goals and values in ways we simply couldn't in the pre-digital era. With many of these technologies, though, our deeper human goals get treated as secondary, or are ignored altogether, in favour of lower 'engagement' goals such as views or clicks.

Our informational environment has flipped from scarcity to abundance in a similar way that our food environment has. The heuristics we had living on the plains of Africa in an environment of food scarcity served us well there. But in the environment of Netflix, Ben & Jerrys Ice Cream and La-Z-Boy recliners, these same heuristics give us less than ideal outcomes.

It can be understood as the undermining of the human will. It starts with distraction in the moment where our ability to focus is fragmented – but then it runs deeper into how it distracts us into living according to certain habits, values and norms.

Our technological distraction is a first order political problem, worldwide. If digital media has become the lens through which we understand and engage with others, we need to figure out how to make that the right kind of lens.

The concentration of power in technology corporations is a moral and political problem that we simply don't have a precedent for. More people use Facebook than speak English for example, so the implications of Facebook, as just one platform, are at the scale of language itself.