Name: Your Computer Is on Fire
ISBN: 9780262539739

Your Computer Is on Fire

"This book sounds an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking up to the large-scale consequences of Silicon Valley-led technophilia. This book trains a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases in our technological systems, showing how they are not just minor bugs to be patched, but part and parcel of ideas that assume technology can fix--and control--society"

What Hacker News says

CatWChainsawMar 2023

I'm working through both The Loop and Your Computer Is On Fire which discuss the authoritarian tendencies of computing as it exists today.

Everyone's been saying for years that democracy's at a breaking point, capitalism's at a breaking point, now technology is at a breaking point. Unless we stop flirting with fractures and actually hit that breaking point and survive, this paradigm will only continue to squeeze. Precious little time to find a future that isn't annihilation or incredibly bleak.

I would wish best of luck to the techbros that anointed themselves our enlightened leaders and refer to everyone outside of tech as "normies" and "lemmings", but I've also read Survival of the Richest.

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aeturnumOct 2021

I think the topline, that Facebook would rather be seen as competently evil than incompetent, is dead on.

But I think that, in his larger arc, Vinsel's epistemology isn't correct. Early optimistic predictions about emerging technology are just that - early and optimistic. There are always extreme early ideas about new tech. Just go google up peoples' predictions (and fears) from 2015 about how VR would transform things. The thing that makes them dangerous is when they show potential for being correct society warps around them. We start spending billions of dollars on self driving cars in 2015 with valuations based on them being delivered in 2020.

But what is the alternative? Vinsel wants us to have "sound information" - but making predictions that end up being wrong is part of checking that something is sound! The future is uncertain. It's true that nothing is ever as big as people think - sometimes it's bigger - but mostly it's much smaller. That guy who wrote the report for McKinsey (a group one should never trust in general) was really hyped to get headlines or really hyped on AI and because he's good at his job you can't tell which it is. The article is clearly nonsense, but it has credibility because it exists on the far side of a sea of uncertainty about something. It's fantasy to imagine we can "know" what something will be and this process seems unfortunately human and unavoidable.

I also think there are a lot of people doing good work in STS on these issues. John Cheney-Lippold, Natasha Dow Schüll, Virginia Eubanks, and Adrian Mackenzie are some of my favorites. I'm excited to read Your Computer Is on Fire but I haven't gotten to it yet. Heck, I think 90% of the bad tech hype is covered the old classic Leviathan and the Air-Pump.

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