tech engineers desire
engineering desire, is the approach of Silicon Valley, authoritarian governments … happens in labs, with cold, lifeless instruments … use intelligence and data to centrally plan a system in which people want things that other people want them to want—things that benefit a certain group of people. This approach poses a serious threat to human agency. It also lacks respect for the capability of people to freely desire what is best for themselves and the people they love
Models of desire, Facebook was built around identity—that is to say, desires. It helps people see what other people have and want. It is a platform for finding, following, and differentiating oneself from models
Amazon mediates desire for things. Google mediates desire for information itself … pioneered what Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, 2019). Companies that operate according to this model translate private human experience into behavioral data that can then be used to engineer their desires, or at least to exploit them for profit.
Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy (2018), by technology guru George Gilder
When technologies are engineered primarily to manipulate human desires and behaviors, it risks reducing people to data instead of recognizing their full human dignity and agency. Monetizing private experience treats inherent human traits like curiosity, sociability as commercial opportunities to exploit rather than respects people’s autonomy over themselves.
Normalizing constant bombardment by push alerts, online comparisons undermines well-being by altering baseline emotional states through behavioral manipulation … undermines free will and substitutes manufactured stimuli over authentic self-determination in shaping one’s own future.
Hyperpersonalized feeds and filter bubbles risk fragmenting shared realities and fragmenting society into isolated tribes disconnected from each other. Lack of built-in friction allows real-world harms like misinformation, addictions, polarization to propagate automatically without impediment through connectivity and data extraction.
linked mentions for "tech engineers desire":
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traincat
'Operation Y': 3 offenders plot a heist. Heroism seen through emulation, brute force, control. Elsewhere, leaders choose 'guardian-architect' or humble 'scholar-gardener'. Surrendering to healing fiction I aim to design a better human experience embracing human empathy and creativity.
'Operation Y': 3 offenders plot a heist. Heroism seen through emulation, brute force, control. Elsewhere, leaders choose 'guardian-architect' or humble 'scholar-gardener'. Surrendering to healing fiction I aim to design a better human experience embracing human empathy and creativity.