One of the highlights of the We Love Technology day which took place on July 12 in Huddersfield was the keynote of architect Usman Haque. He titled it “I Hate Technology” and listed several things that bother him about technology. My rough notes:
The word “technology” means something different today than what it used to imply in the past. Technology used to imply “knowledge“, it was the study of making. It was not an object but the description of an object. Technology was more about the description of systems. Today we tend to think that technology resides in physical things. That is a rather dramatic change, from the way we describe things to objects containing this thing we call technology.
Consequence:
Artefacts. Fetishism for a piece of technology. You would never grab a frog and show it to people saying “this is wonderful biology!” or “Look at this biology!” We have developed a very mechanistic view of technology. Inspired by Steve Jobs?
A second problem is that we have the illusion of progress. When we think about technology, the words that spring to our minds are “innovation, value, efficiency.”
But a look at train timetables (from 1973 to 1997) shows that even if loads of money has been poured into the train system, the trains actually got slower.
Example: Going from Portlaoise to Dublin took 51 minutes with steam engine in 1928, in 2006 it takes 55 minutes.
Philadelphia to Los Angeles in 1965 lasted 5 hours and 5 minutes. In 2005, the trip was 6 hours and 1 minutes.