Tag: Humanity

Technology, Humanity, and the Existential Test

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Can we govern ourselves? Will we?

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If you pull far enough back from the day to day debate over technology’s impact on society – far enough that Facebook’s destabilization of democracy, Amazon’s conquering of capitalism, and Google’s domination of our data flows start to blend into one broader, more cohesive picture – what does that picture communicate about the state of humanity today?

Technology forces us to recalculate what it means to be human – what is essentially us, and whether technology represents us, or some emerging otherness which alienates or even terrifies us. We have clothed ourselves in newly discovered data, we have yoked ourselves to new algorithmic harnesses, and we are waking to the human costs of this new practice. Who are we becoming?

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Team Human: Our Last Best Hope for Peeps

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Team Human: Our Last Best Hope for Peeps

I thought long and hard about how best to respond to the thousands of emails I’ve received since publishing Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. People, companies, mayors, cooperatives, towns and big corporations, all looking for ways to distribute prosperity more widely, start local currencies, build platform cooperatives, convert to employee ownership, offer dividends instead of capital gains, or crowdfund a bookstore. I’ve answered more than half — or about 20,000 of them — individually. But I realized that it’s really not me who has the answers; it’s you.

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