WEEK 6: Not that optimistic, still

This week’s reading contents seem to be quite appealing to me, since they suffused a sense of pessimistic feeling towards future technology. For the past month, I have been unstopping concerned about the side effect of ubiquitous media. I fear the possibility that technology would be intelligent enough to control us, just like what happened in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, what invented by human finally kill human itself.

What I need to emphasize is that I am never a technological determinist. In China, I always treated myself as a neo-liberalist to same degree, but when reading the story of “Weev”, I realized that I haven’t get that far indeed. ”Computerization will set you free.” What kind of freedom does it mean? Is there any boundary for this kind of freedom? I wondered.

One good example is the 3D-printing. Is this just like the technology of cloning? How could it be if it is used to print animals or human? What's more, what about Bitcoin? Could it be possible that it becomes the top one currency of the world one day instead of American Dollar? In fact, for a nation, the control of its currency is so
vital since currency could control the whole market, then the totality of economy, then the nation itself.

To be honest, I’m not that optimistic about the utopia of the future cyber world. For me, the “free” or the “open” market does bring more opportunities and possibilities, however, it also brings completely new order to the world rather than a “free” and “open” one which isn’t written down literally but appears everywhere.


Work cited:

Golumbia, David, “Ceberlibertarianism: The Extremist Foundations of ‘Digital Freedom’,” Viginia Commonwealth University, Dept of English: Sep 2013

Winner, Langdon, “Technology Today: Utopia or Dystopia?” Social Research, Vol. 64, No. 3, Technology and the rest of culture (FALL 1997), pp.989-1017