In South-Africa there has been severe water shortages due to a long drought and bad water management. The following short video gives us a glimpse of the terrible consequences such as police cracking down prohibited water use, such as someone trying to earn some living washing cars.
Two important news updates via Tv5Monde’s 7 jours sur la planète emission of 30 March 2019:
In France there has been a change in gender marking in job titles. A large part of previously traditional masculin job titles did not have a feminine form. Via 7 jours sur la planète.
Mooie inaugerele rede1 van Prof. Annemarie Mol over “Wat is Kiezen?” waarin ze in een empirisch filosofische manier niet vraagt naar “wat kiezen in wezen is, maar wat het is in enkele van zijn talrijke, gevarieerde verschijningsvormen”. Haar nadruk ligt ook dat technische artefacten nieuwe keuzemogelijkheden schept en verborgen keuzes kunnen bevatten:
I have been getting into the ideas of critical theory with some great podcasts and videos. Stephen West from Philosophize This did an extensive 7 part series on The Frankfurt School, with a large focus on Herbert Marcuse. I especially liked his introductions of Marcuse’s works and the parts on culture industry. I also watched this interview Bryan Magee did with Marcuse in 1977 for his BBC program. In the interview Marcuse gives an overview of the thoughts of the members of the school and his involvement with the New Left movement. The whole discussion with Magee is great as can be expected from him and who also very critical. And lastly I listened to an episode of The Philosophers Zone titled “Are we enlightened?” that came out today by chance. In the short timespan of thirty minutes the podcast provides a fanstatic overview of critical theory and, as the title suggests, focuses on the theory’s roots against enlightement style thinking.
In an article from 1976 I came accross in the book the Social Shaping of Technology1, Ruth Schwartz Cowan looks at the introduction of technological appliances in the home and their effects on home work. Her analysis shows that the “industrialization of the home” was very different process from what we might suspect: that it would descrease the amount of work needed to be done by housewives. Rather the technologies seems to have shifted the work and contributed to changes in aspects of the work (such as the emotional aspects).
Today Mark Zuckerberg accounced his new vision for Facebook as a more privacy-focused company. The principal change he thinks should be to have interoperable end-to-end encryption for all of Facebook’s apps. Although this would be an interesting improvement to protect the communication, the links with law enforcement are worrying. Who is deciding what patterns identify “bad actors”, and how are they not influenced by governments? It also a way for Facebook to seem like they deem it appropriate to decide who are “bad actors”, which is equally worrying in my opinion.
A recent article from Kudina and Verbeek1 explores a different strategy to deal with the ‘Collingride dilemma’, a double-bind problem which roughly states that the impacts of new technology cannot easily be anticipated until the technology is developed, but that it hard to change the technology then. While in earlier stages it is easy to change the technology, but then we don’t know yet what it’s impact will be. The authors focus on the ethical variant of this dilemma which states that our value frameworks to evalue the technologies also change because of the technology:
Fantastic podcast from France Culture’s “Les chemins de la philosophie”. Professor Patrick Wotling discusses on the podcast the philosophy of Nietzche and how forgetting can be a condition for the well functioning of social life: