More on the illusion of cyberutopia (III)

Kara Swisher, "Facebook and the Fires," The New York Times, Nov. 15, 2018; see also (1) (2)

The toxic smoke is a bleak backdrop and an apt metaphor for where Silicon Valley finds itself.

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Excerpt:

The overall sense of this year is that the brilliant digital minds who told us they were changing the world for the better might have miscalculated.

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Bret Stephens, "How Plato Foresaw Facebook’s Folly," The New York Times, Nov. 17

Technology promises to make easy things that, by their intrinsic nature, have to be hard.

Excerpt:

[W]e we tend to forget that technology is only as good as the people who use it. We want it to elevate us; we tend to degrade it. In a better world, Twitter might have been a digital billboard of ideas and conversation ennobling the public square. We’ve turned it into the open cesspool of the American mind. Facebook was supposed to serve as a platform for enhanced human interaction, not a tool for the lonely to burrow more deeply into their own isolation. ...

But the deeper reason that technology so often disappoints and betrays us is that it promises to make easy things that, by their intrinsic nature, have to be hard.

Tweeting and trolling are easy. Mastering the arts of conversation and measured debate is hard. Texting is easy. Writing a proper letter is hard. Looking stuff up on Google is easy. Knowing what to search for in the first place is hard. Having a thousand friends on Facebook is easy. Maintaining six or seven close adult friendships over the space of many years is hard. Swiping right on Tinder is easy. Finding love — and staying in it — is hard. ...