reading essays by digital artists and as someone who's worked at well known tech cos her whole career, it always feels like artists overestimate the novelty of tech and underestimate the material conditions of capitalism or vice versa?

someone like James Bridle, for example, comes across as almost techno-utopian, in that he sees technological literacy as a way to resist late capitalist excess; optimism is then placed in understanding technology rather than understanding the material circumstances surrounding it

but what Bridle gets right is that surveillance capitalism isn't just the same pattern applied to new commodities, it handles dissent and criticism by keeping humans at arm's length, using the similar techniques to target commerical and interpersonal communication

that crossing of the streams IS important, but only insofar as it supports these material structures. you can't talk about surveillance capitalism as a problem that will go away once we understand how the algorithm works, the algorithm has to be destroyed

enough of what we think of as modern technology emerges as rotten fruit from a rotten tree, it's not enough to imagine what the people will do with technology when it's truly driven for our benefit, we have to tear at the roots till we remove what's rotten at its core

it's possible for technologies to be imagined as coexisting with "loving futures" but in order for that to happen, the underpinnings of those technologies themselves have to be reimagined, not just their products