i am very rapidly being identified as the tech pessimist among the programmers and techy people in my program lol
of course i'm not, like, a primitivist or something, i'm just an anarchist who's wary of technological capitalism (and all capitalism).
had an interesting and demonstrative interaction during our last seminar where we were talking about VR and AR and similar tech and i basically said "I think it's cool and there's a lot of interesting things that could be done with, but its price is a barrier," to which a classmate said "well i think it's like iPhones. iPhones used to be rare and expensive when they were new, but now everyone has one."
to which i said: "i can't afford an iPhone."
what does it mean when we're talking about "everyone having it" regarding tech? does it actually mean everyone? or does it mean a slice of decently secure and privileged people? and, for that matter, is "everyone having it" a good thing necessarily? in the case of mobile phones and much other technology i'd say no. smartphones are incredibly expensive and while very useful and very impressive devices, they are often required to be able to interact with society. in kind of the same way as a car, there are things that are expected of you that you can't do if you don't have a smartphone. which means that you have to pay hundreds of dollars to have a device that "everyone has" and if you can't you're blocked from things that are expected of you from society.
is that a good thing?
