“Technosolutionism is a way of understanding the world that assigns priority to engineered solutions to human problems” writes Christine Rosen. “Its first principle is the notion that an app, a machine, a software program, or an algorithm offers the best solution to any complicated problem.”
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. In fact, it’s made things far, far worse, according to Alana Newhouse:
Once people accepted the idea of an app, you could get them to pay for dozens of them—if not more. You could get people to send thousands of dollars to strangers in other countries to stay in homes they’d never seen in cities they’d never visited. You could train them to order in food—most of their food, even all of their food—from restaurants that they’d never been to, based on recommendations from people they’d never met. You could get them to understand their social world not as consisting of people whose families and faces one knew, which was literally the definition of social life for hundreds of thousands of years, but rather as composed of people who belonged to categories—“also followed by,” “friends in common,” “BIPOC”—that didn’t even exist 15 years ago….
Reminds me of a conversation I had with a millennial a few years ago. I was making fun of her generation—I know, I know, shooting fish in a barrel and all that—when she rather indignantly pointed to the creation of social media as an example of what her peers had done to contribute to the greater good. And then she threw down the gauntlet: “What’s your generation done?”
Given the choice of doing nothing and unleashing Facebook on the world, I told her, I think I’d rather be known for being a slacker.
