Notices by Howard Rheingold (hrheingold@mastodon.social), page 3

Contrary to popular belief, many Amish are clever technologists. When I spent time with them for this Wired article -- about why and how they use mobile phones -- one local who employed Amish artisans told me: "they could build a space ship, given the right materials." They use compressed air as "Amish electricity." They evaluate technologies in relation to their effect on family, community: No to landlines, yes to state of the art gas grills.

#technology

https://www.wired.com/1999/01/amish/

I created and manage a little free art gallery

#artwork

Surveillance-based advertising, where searching for a sneaker inundates you with sneaker ads, and which perverts the sociality of social media with ad-driven algorithmic curation, has corroded online culture. I would point out that attempts to get people to pay for culture have failed. One of the reasons for the demise of the Whole Earth Review was our principled refusal to accept advertising. If you want online culture without advertising, are you prepared to shell out for it?

My 1968 Reed thesis was about neurofeedback, consciousness, mind amplification, and the noosphere.

http://rheingold.com/texts/HowardRheingoldReedthesis.pdf

Here I am with the old skool EEG that spat out reams of fanfold paper (and other stuff lying around the lab)

Twenty five years ago, I thought about my decade of experience facilitating conversations and communities online and wrote this quickly.

What would you add to it? If I revise with suggested additions, let me know how/whether you would like to be attributed in list of acknowledgements.

It might become a (more) useful document for others trying to host good conversations online.

https://www.rheingold.com/texts/artonlinehost.html

#OnlineCommunities

I've become convinced that understanding how networks work is an essential 21st century literacy. This is the first in a series of short videos about how the structure and dynamics of networks influences political freedom, economic wealth creation, and participation in the creation of culture.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=g6UKWozzVRM

#Networks

I'm interested in critical conversations about #technology. I'm a technology enthusiast. I'm grateful for chemotherapy and html and enthusiastic about #onlinecommunities -- but also have always tried to think about how and why our tool use can change us and our environment in undesirable ways. A thread:

Off the top of my head, four different concepts/metaphors have proved to be useful.

Lewis Mumford's "megamachine" -- the notion that the ur-technology that drove its evolution was the way rulers and their muscle allied with priests to build pyramids and irrigation projects by treating people as components in a hierarchical machine with overseers at every level.

Heidegger is mostly impenetrable to me, but I latched onto his notion of a "standing reserve." Humans make use of the world, (...more)

we turn stones into axes and came to see the world as a "standing reserve" for our exploitation.

Jacques Ellul wrote presciently and somewhat depressingly about the future of technology back in the 1950s. In English, his masterwork is "The Technological Society." In the original French, it's "La Technique." Technique, or any method for achieving ends with increasing efficiency, is the foundation -- like standing reserve, it's a way of seeing the world. Technology grows from it. (more)

Finally , Langdon Winner taught me about "regimes." The greater part of technology is not visible. An automobile is the result of a complex global supply chain, from mines to microchips, and its use of petroleum is changing the climate.

So...what other concepts/metaphors have proved to be useful to you for thinking about #technology