It may be because I did some mental associations between the article and the header image that aren’t there in the substance, but the impression I got from the author is that we aren’t living in the utopian techno-future of flying cars, robot butlers, and 20-hour work weeks that mid-century technologists promised us simply by applying technology as a solution to everything. Again, no one is arguing that technology is bad, or that it hasn’t done anything for anybody. The argument being made is that, because there has been little focus on the human costs of certain technologies, we’ve ended up with a world in which a lot of people at the very low end are certainly doing better than they ever have, but they’ve been pulled up into a world in which inequalities and existing power structures have not been leveled as we were promised, but instead re-entrenched and even amplified by the careless and/or unthinking application of technology in the developed world.
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