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An upward redistribution of certain undesirable futures
Natural filters applied Like all supplicants of literary cyberpunk, I’ve devoted a decent amount of armchair time to parsing the oft-quoted William Gibson-attributed maxim, “The future is already here -- it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Despite having some serious attribution issues, it is a favorite of technology optimists and a mainstay of douchebag keynotes for all sorts of industry conferences. It is generally interpreted as some version of the following -- that human progress realized in “the future” is generally technology-enabled and that those on the lower socio-economic rungs have less access to the technologies (the Internet, ubiquitous computing, etc.) with which “the future” manifests. A footnote would point out that, yes, many technologies have been distributed down the socio-economic ladder as they have become cheaper to manufacture at scale. There are other futures, though, largely outside of the experience of the global upper and middle classes. From Bhopa...
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