Currents 067: Zak Stein on Ending Nihilistic Design

Jim talks with Zak Stein about the Consilience Project's article "Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic Design." They discuss how technologies actualize & encode values, 2nd- & 3rd-order effects of technologies, the "invisible hand" approach to design, effects of cars on culture, landscapes, & sexuality, the work of historian of technology Lewis Mumford, how smartphones affect structures of communication & cognition, how the bathroom scale changed the meaning of health, clock time & capitalism, the deskilling tradeoff of technology, how Facebook became a case study in nihilistic design, the difficulty of predicting nth-order effects, monitoring & predicting psychosocial externalities, Jim's role in early social-media design choices, axiological design, our accidental planetary computational stack, developing co-responsibility in tech, whether banning advertising could change everything, 5 propositions towards axiological design, thinking about tech & its users in the whole context, and much more.