# Elements Of Technology Criticism

By [Mike Pepi](https://paragraph.com/@mike-pepi) · 2021-11-24

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1.  **Data is never “raw,” immanent, or neutral.** There is always bias and distortion in capture and modeling.
    
2.  **The internet is not “a thing.”** It is a distributed network of many layers. Treating it as its own monolith with a central cultural logic presents problems.
    
3.  **Technology can never occupy a space outside of capitalism.** With rare exceptions, every application, company, or innovation will have a funding source, a board, and a bottom-line; and in all cases the logic of capitalism will eventually supersede and control technical tools. What we identify as “tech” is just capitalism, but faster and worse.
    
4.  **You can’t solve a social problem with a technical solution.** Often, applying technical fixes only treat the symptom, and, in failing to address the underlying cause of the problem, makes it worse.
    
5.  **If you are not paying for a platform, your data is the product.** Attention is data and data is a commodity. If something is free and connected to a network, beware of the tradeoffs.
    
6.  **Platforms are not institutions.** Do not confuse them.
    
7.  **Decentralization is an illusion.** Even distributed networks enforce hierarchies of power and influence.
    
8.  **Software is hard.** Computing interfaces, rules, interactions, and protocols encode certain behaviors, and for that they should be scrutinized and interrogated as part of the body politic and the built environment.
    
9.  **Algorithms are made of people.** They are editors, they steer and privilege certain values, and are never objective.
    
10.  **Beware of “open access.”** Information may want to be free but beware of the consequences. Somewhere a new gatekeeper will benefit.
    
11.  **Once a measure becomes a target it ceases to become a measure (Goodhart’s Law revisited).** Or, when you over-optimize for a goal you’ll often destroy the thing or the market you set out to augment. Or, optimizing for a goal in a closed system will reinforce the production of that goal, and cease to deliver any insights.
    
12.  **Information is the enemy of narrative.** The more information, the more doubtful the narrative becomes.
    
13.  **Crowdsourcing is a race to the bottom.** Labor, knowledge, education, etc.. are all cheapened when forced to compete on a platform. Making it easier to perform a task has massive externalities.
    
14.  **Your brain is not a computer and your computer is not a brain.** There are things that cannot be automated, and intelligences that machines cannot have.
    

Mike Pepi [@mikepepi](http://twitter.com/mikepepi) (last updated 8/15/2018)

Originally published: 8/15/2018 at

[https://www.mikepepi.com/blog/elements-of-technology-criticism](https://www.mikepepi.com/blog/elements-of-technology-criticism)

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*Originally published on [Mike Pepi](https://paragraph.com/@mike-pepi/elements-of-technology-criticism)*