I intensively skimmed the first suggested article “Technology is not Values Neutral. Ending the reign of nihilistic design”, and found the analysis mostly lucid and free of political buzzwords. There’s definitely a lot worth engaging with there.
Similarly to what you write however, I got a sense of unjustified optimism in the proposed solution, which centers around analyzing second and third order effects of technology during their development. Unfortunately, the article does not appear to acknowledge that predicting such societal effects seems really hard, as evidenced by the observation that people in the past have anecdotically been usually wrong about the sociatal effects of technologies, and that there is no consensus even on the current effects of e.g. social media on society.
I intensively skimmed the first suggested article “Technology is not Values Neutral. Ending the reign of nihilistic design”, and found the analysis mostly lucid and free of political buzzwords. There’s definitely a lot worth engaging with there. Similarly to what you write however, I got a sense of unjustified optimism in the proposed solution, which centers around analyzing second and third order effects of technology during their development. Unfortunately, the article does not appear to acknowledge that predicting such societal effects seems really hard, as evidenced by the observation that people in the past have anecdotically been usually wrong about the sociatal effects of technologies, and that there is no consensus even on the current effects of e.g. social media on society.