Eric Miller on Thu, 11 Oct 2001 08:16:26 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> re: the double-edged sword thread |
hi all, thought I'd throw in my thinking on this...maybe I'm oversimplifying, but maybe there's a level of tech agnosticism in the US that doesn't exist elsewhere. That Americans tend to see emerging technologies as the equivalent of a new element added to the periodic table. That a given technology has defining characteristics, has a given set of potential uses, and requires experimentation to understand. There's also a tacit understanding that some technologies may have more nefarious uses, just as plutonium tends to elicit negative associations more often than, say, magnesium. (okay, looks like I'm guilty of over-analogizing...) So we Americans just _do_ stuff. we create new technologies at an alarming pace, and expect that the good-vs-bad value judgements will sort themselves out eventually. This implicit American belief in "neutral until proven otherwise" brought the world technologies that have defined progress in the 20th century...but also resulted in a nation that still refuses to accept that it consumes 25% of the world's resources in an absurdly unsustainable manner (bordering on self-delusion) because some think that we can't prove global warming. but that's another discussion. So maybe there's a symbiotic relationship here? Damn the consequences, the Americans will build stuff and say, "look what we've done!" while the more theoretical folks on the eastern side of the Atlantic will figure out what it means to society. ...including whether history decides that a given technology is intrinsically good or bad. Eric # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net