Tech Knows Best Asserts a Google Employee
March 21, 2014
I highly recommend that you read Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Bluff (La Bluff technologique) (1988) available from Amazon and at this link as of March 21, 2014.
I read “Occupy Founder Calls on Obama to Appoint Eric Schmidt ‘CEO of America’.” According to the write up, Justine Tunney, a Google engineer (who must be really smart by definition, right?) “is demanding that the tech industry take over the US government.”
Like Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” I find the idea interesting. No doubt Mr.Schmidt is flattered by one of the Google elite’s idea. According to the write up:
Yasha Levine, a reporter for Silicon Valley publication Pando Daily, noted the seeming discrepancy between Tunney’s former anarchist beliefs and her current role at Google. Since her arrival at the firm, he writes, “she has become an astroturfer par excellence for the company, including showing up in a comment section to bash my reporting on Google’s vast for-profit surveillance operation.”
Amusing in a way. Now back to Ellul. His informed monograph points out that solving a problem via technology and technologists may not deliver the solution anticipated. I am confident that Justine Tunney is familiar with Ellul’s viewpoint and rejects it.
An old French theologian-philosopher is definitely not Google material. I would suggest that the alleged recommendations to retire all government employees with full pensions, transfer administrative authority to the tech industry, and appoint Eric Schmidt CEO of America are rational within the Googley world.
For an old person in rural Kentucky, the ideas seem to ignore Jacques Ellul’s insights and remind me of the crazy lists that IDC type writers cook up to seem informed.
Around the cast iron stove in Harrod’s Creek, the ideas might be greeted with considerable skepticism. If you work at an outfit that wants to defeat death and build a phone inside a human body via self assembly nanotech, Justine Tunney’s ideas make perfect sense. At least that’s my assumption.
Stephen E Arnold, March 21, 2014
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