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The Promise of an Inevitable Tech Future that Obscures More than It Inspires

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Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, UCLA Professor of Graduate Studies of Education and Information Sciences and Bedari Kindness Institute Faculty Advisory Committee member, recently co-authored a hybrid academic/journalistic piece in Salon discussing how tech elites have captured our fascination, while pushing pathways that likely disenfranchise almost everyone except themselves. Dr. Srinivasan and Mr. Peter Bloom write:

“Our blind trust in digital technology has not only had a huge impact on economic and political realities, but also our beliefs and aspirations; from what we consider to be progress, to the stories we tell ourselves around who an innovator is. Perniciously, these stories even appear to be fodder for those hoping to escape a supposedly unredeemable society and unsaveable planet. Whether due to global pandemics, climate crises, nuclear proliferation, or gross economic and political inequalities, collapse seems always right around the corner, if not here already, and the wealthiest and most powerful in our world are planning for it and profiting from it while the rest of us are left to accept our fate.”

To read the full article, “Tech Barons Dream of a Better World — Without the Rest of Us,” click HERE.

 

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UCLA Professor Safiya Noble Pens A Reckoning for Restoration and Reparation

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For the newly launched magazine, NOEMA, Dr. Safiya Noble wrote an essay that calls out the titans of technology, and challenges us all to look at the societal needs of this pivotal moment. As calls for abolition and racial justice echo from coast to coast, Dr. Noble informs us how “Big Tech is implicated in displacing high-quality knowledge institutions–newsrooms, libraries, schools, and universities–by destabilizing funding through tax evasion, actively eroding the public goods we need to flourish.” She also writes:

“We need new paradigms, not more new tech. We need fair and equitable implementations of public policy that bolster our collective good. We need to center the most vulnerable among us–the working poor and the disabled, those who live under racial and religious tyranny, the discriminated against and the oppressed. We need to house people and provide health, employment, creative arts, and educational resources. We need to close the intersectional racial wealth gap.”

Dr. Noble is an Associate Professor in UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, co-director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, and a faculty advisor to the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute.

To read the complete essay, “The Loss Of Public Goods To Big Tech,” click HERE.

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