Re: <nettime> social media critique: next steps?

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

On 2018-01-17 03:22, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> The future of humanity is the struggle between humans that control
> machines and machines that control humans.

Machines are never in control. Even if you believe that the liberal CEO
FB has somewhat lost control of his creation, it still does what it's
supposed to do ever since the first angel (Peter Thiel) touched it: make
investors rich. The moment it would stop doing this, the plug would be
pulled, no matter how much each of us depends on it.

Therefore, I would phrase the dilemma differently. The struggle is
whether an oligarchy controls the mass of people through machines, and
the mass of people using the machines to articulate and enact their
collective will.

In may ways, machines -- deep-learning, big data -- are god. The seat of
knowledge on a scale that mere mortals cannot comprehend it and the
source of action that, for all its arbitrary surface appearance, can
always claim an underlying justification that remains hidden to all but
a few.

A combination of ancient egypt and feudal europe.


Felix






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