Machines of Laughter and Forgetting

[unrepentant progress]

Until very recently, technology had a clear, if boring, purpose: by taking care of the Little Things, it enabled us, its human masters, to focus on the Big Things. “Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible,” proclaimed that noted connoisseur of contemplation Oscar Wilde.

Fortunately, he added a charming clarification: “Human slavery is wrong, insecure and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.”

...

The hidden truth about many attempts to “bury” technology is that they embody an amoral and unsustainable vision.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/opinion/sunday/morozov-machines-of-laughter-and-forgetting.html

There are a lot of people who already voluntarily use extensions and apps which do exactly the kind of thing Morozov is talking about -- they block access to certain sites during prescribed times, or lock up the browser every x minutes thus forcing the user to take a break. And many judiciously paranoid people prefer to jump through unnecessary hoops to do everyday tasks like sending an email because they want to feel secure. So they use GnuPG from the command line, and they store their passwords in an encrypted file on a password protected thumb drive, rather than using a service like LastPass or an extension that integrates encryption into their email. I'm sure too that if there was such a program as Morozov describes, throwing out obscure factoids about their internet habits, many people would prefer to use that too. It's digital asceticism, and IMHO, more about feeling in control than promoting reflection.

On the flip side, there's the forthcoming Facebook press conference at which Facebook will announce what the tech press has been calling the Facebook Phone. The Facebook Phone is expected to take the form of an HTC manufactured phone running a modified version of Android which will see Facebook tightly integrated into the operating system. Such a beast would be akin to something out of Richard M. Stallman's nightmares -- a computer you take with you everywhere you go with the capability to spy on every little thing you do without your knowledge. Yet it's also the embodiment of Donald Norman's invisible computer, and Mark Zuckerberg's frictionless sharing. If executed well, a lot of people will love it. And there will be much fretting by the digital ascetics over the new digital hedonists.