Friday, May 16, 2008

Subversive Technology?

Some technologies are apparently neutral.

For example, the Internet and other media are supposed both to promote and to undermine the interests of the State and Big Business. Witness Rupert Murdoch and the Chinese Government.

Cameras can be used as mass surveillance devices, or to invade the privacy of "private" individuals (including so-called "celebrities"). They can also be used to read private notes by public servants, and many innocent snap-happy tourists have been suspected of terrorist reconnaissance.

And clocks. "I was your slave, now you are mine, I am Time."

But even if a given technology can be used in both ways, it may still lean more one way than the other. Are some technologies genuinely subversive; if so, how have they been allowed to exist?

Further Reading

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