Some of us rant about technology being misused.
That's because we're technologists!
I always aimed to do good things (or at least fun things)
I never went home from work feeling like I did something nasty.
Science and technology have been put to good and horrendous ends. Too many on the horrendous side.
Kevin Kelley wrote some time ago in "What Technology Wants" these "affordances" that technology can provide, and in a way seems to "want" when people choose wisely.
So, looking at the evolution of life and the long-term histories of past technologies, what are the long-term trajectories of the technium? What does technology want?
Possibilities
To increase diversity
To maximize freedom/choices
To expand the space of the possible
Efficiencies
To increase specialization/uniqueness
To increase power density
To increase density of meaning
To engage all matter and energy
To reach ubiquity and free-ness
To become beautiful
Complexity
To increase complexity
To increase social co-dependency
To increase self-referential nature
To align with nature
Evolvability
To accelerate evolvability
To play the infinite game
But what many have made of it are all the things that steal time, echo ideas rather than expand their space, destroy meaning, increase reliance on a few foci (like one), and play finite games. where one wins, and the other loses [1] rather than win-win situations. Technology like casino math, dictates that one side always comes out ahead. Not by the nature of technology, but by its application.
[1] See the fabulous book "Finite and Infinite Games" by James Carse
A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
There's actually a copy at the
Internet Archive.
https://ia801905.us.archive.org/18/items/james-p-carse-finite-and-infinite-games/James%20P%20carse%20Finite%20and%20Infinite%20Games.pdf
Both those links should work.
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