I'm not saying that at all, I'm saying very specifically:
The material conditions of people alive in the west today are significantly worse than they were in 1999, largely as the result of the ascendance of the digital platforms and economic arrangements that organizations like MIT and Berkman were taking money to promote.
Ordinary people today are more lonely, overwhelmed, polarized and impoverished. The "new" economics they were promoting - gig economies, crowdfunding, "conversational" marketing - have only resulted in a new form of serfdom, upward movement of capital from the poor to the rich, and a completely collapse of dignity in public life.
In fact, I'll even go a step further and suggest that what we needed was _more_ negativity. Techno-positivity and lack of critical thought is exactly how we got in this mess.
It sounds like an opinion, and you can certainly make a case there. But I feel equally strong that networked technology today is amazing, and 1999 sucked. Being able to look up how to do anything, talk to people I know instantly. Cameras in your pocket, wikipedia, phones, collaborative documents, gps on maps, youtube, online shopping, they've been great equalizers in many ways.
All the things you mentioned were serious problems before just in a different way. Advertising was horrible when I watched broadcast TV. I spent probably 2 hours each day looking at commercials. Propoganda was ubiquitous and there wasn't even a place you could point out it was happening. The gig economy jobs back then were just different jobs with fewer options, like pumping gas or minimum wage at McDonald's or greeting people at Walmart. And now online discussion allows people to be more open about mental health and the anonymity let's you talk about relationship or depression problems with others.
It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than what life was like before. And one thing I agree with you on, is that it isn't because of the Media Lab or Berkman. It's because of a lot of people making slow incremental progress throughout the entire tech stack.
Maybe the lives of people in the West did get worse due to Internet (debatable), but the lives of everybody else might have gotten better.
If not for Internet, I'd be a completely different and I suspect much more limited person (I'm from EE). Internet provided me access to role models in my areas of interest who showed me how high the sky can be in our industry (if not for that, I'd be some depressed J2EE developer/Project Manager in a local telco or something). People in the US can just have in-person access to such role models (e.g. by getting a job at some cool company, doing a PhD at strong US technical school etc.), while in backwater areas of the world, if not for Internet, you would not even be aware of this whole cool universe.
I think your argument is the start of a very important and stimulating discussion, and you've worded it perfectly. I think the negative aspects of the "digital revolution" definitely exist and starry-eyed Silicon Valley positivism will never find the solutions or even detect them.
That said, I deeply disagree with your conclusion. I think, barring politics or pandemics of course, the world is objectively better due to the digital revolution. It's not only a positive force, but it's an overall positive one.
You capture the symptoms of technodystopia well but seem to say the cause is due more to the techno than the dystopia.
Hyper Globalization, the Post Colonial re-emergence of Asia, and the forgone peace dividends of Forever Wars are not due to technology.
MIT & The Labs, for all their shortcomings laid bare by many in these comments, are contained within a larger society experiencing larger forces at play on par with the early industrial revolution where urbanized mind numbing factory exploitation existed but also eventually led to an empowered middle class with more leisure time, disposable income, and upward mobility than at any time before.
Perhaps the last 20+ years of technical progress efficiencies were unjustly captured by return on investment capital instead of by increasing everyone else's leisure time but your average western person who no longer enjoys a 1999 quality of life still has a whole lot to be thankful for even if they choose to enjoy the hard fought for luxury of taking it all for granted.
The Media Lab’s arguably most widely adopted product, the Scratch programming language... is that leading to the “collapse of dignity?”
What about Guitar Hero? Are those guys, Media Lab grad students who spent a decade after graduation until they found hard earned success... did they create a “new serfdom?”
The Berkman Center houses the historic DoJ tech antitrust lawyers. Do you think antitrust won’t play a role in reversing “the movement of capital from the poor to the rich?”
Anyway, there are a lot of people who rail on the academy or whatever. I suppose your opinion, however stylized, is as good as anyone else’s.
GuitarFreaks did not come out of the Media Lab. No disrespect to Egozy and Rigopulos, but HMX's success (even before GH) seems to have come specifically after they dumped Media Lab-inspired plans and started drawing inspiration from the Japanese arcade scene.
You are strawmanning OPs argument by giving those examples as if that’s what they said. OP seems to criticize the ethos of Media Lab as professed, not any particular products. Not only that, you criticize their form and dismiss them as inaccurate but don’t actually posit any counter-arguments.
I think the Media Lab's most widely known project was probably the failed One Laptop Per Child initiative, which I think perfectly illustrates my point.
Turns out what people in the third world need isn't donated laptops, it's liberation from an economic system which keeps them deliberately impoverished. They need food, vaccines, unions, debt jubilees and nationalization of natural resources.
The MML/Berkman ideology is literally that laptops bring wealth. In reality, wealth brings laptops.
The material conditions of people alive in the west today are significantly worse than they were in 1999, largely as the result of the ascendance of the digital platforms and economic arrangements that organizations like MIT and Berkman were taking money to promote.
Ordinary people today are more lonely, overwhelmed, polarized and impoverished. The "new" economics they were promoting - gig economies, crowdfunding, "conversational" marketing - have only resulted in a new form of serfdom, upward movement of capital from the poor to the rich, and a completely collapse of dignity in public life.
In fact, I'll even go a step further and suggest that what we needed was _more_ negativity. Techno-positivity and lack of critical thought is exactly how we got in this mess.