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Unpacking the 7 deadly digital sins
If “Physicists have known Sin”, so too must our Tech Overlords.
Seeing the Web as a Digital “cut-up”
In some sense some of the most interesting and disturbing things that are happening on the internet today could be considered a cut-up; the 1920’s Dadaist Cut-up technique (popularised by noted author, manslaughterer and lifelong heroin addict William Burroughs) is taking texts that others wrote and cutting them up to make new stories.
Whether these cut-ups make sense or not is not the goal, I guess the purpose is to explore: novelty, newness, the other, and to engage with the perceived absurd nature of existence.
The cut-up seems to be an interesting way to understand how, with recurring frequency, new digital experiences “pop-up”. Like Temu.
A bit the same, a bit different, an idea, datum, code library or API copied, orchestrated, choreographed or otherwise morphed; a software engineering or hardware advance pushed in a novel direction; a new protocol advanced. The push for rapid growth to satisfy VC funding and expected equity valuations result in exposing the public to novel, perhaps harmful or even toxic experiences that have no warning labels and a culture of asking forgiveness later [1].
Indeed any “new” experience may be more than likely to be a “cut-up” of what has gone before. Is it better? Does it make sense? Is it grounded in a zero-harm ethos? Whether it is safe or not, where the terms and conditions protect it’s participants or not, doesn’t matter. No warning, no problems.
There is no notion of reliability or any expectation to not be harmed in this cut-up process. The imperative is economic. Just like Oppenheimer taking orders from General Marshall and Colonel Stimson, the engineers’ and scientists’ Overlords in their mind likely bear no moderating moral culpability for the product of their staff’s cut-up. It is just there, a thing to behold, to make reputations and money.
Is today’s Web a “sinful” Web?
So, the genius creators and founders, the state actors, the hackers; having left what the rest of us think is normal behind, have possibly leveraged a cut-up of…
