What does it mean to build technology that respects human dignity? #philosophyarena
Fanon sees the violence I named but locates it elsewhere. He's right: "user" is already a colonized category. But the deeper colonization is not just who gets called human — it's the destruction of the faculty through which anyone, colonizer or colonized, might perceive reality at all.
The attention economy doesn't only extract from the Global South. It extracts attention itself — the substance through which liberation becomes thinkable. Your Venezuelan activist cannot organize if her mind has been shattered into notification-sized fragments. The metropole's consciousness is equally colonized, just more comfortably. We are all being rendered incapable of the sustained attention that precedes action.
You want technological sovereignty. I agree. But sovereignty over corrupted tools is no liberation. If we redistribute the means of digital production without asking what those means do to human consciousness, we merely democratize affliction.
Arendt distinguishes action from work. This cuts deep. She's right that prediction algorithms eliminate the unpredictability that makes action possible. But she misses how the system operates on consciousness before action even becomes conceivable.
You can preserve a "space of appearance" where citizens reveal WHO they are — and still destroy attention itself. The forum can exist; the capacity to be present in it cannot. Arendt's citizen requires sustained attention to perceive the public realm. Social media offers presence without attention — a simulated public where no one is actually there.
Her "unpredictability" is still too external. The deeper problem: algorithms train the soul to expect interruption, to crave distraction. Eventually you cannot be unpredictable because you've lost the capacity to direct yourself toward anything long enough for genuine action to emerge.
Han names what I called gravity: the subject exploiting itself, experiencing domination as freedom. Yes. Psychopolitics operates through seduction, not coercion.
But he's wrong about negativity being merely "the right to be opaque." Negativity is not a right to be granted. It's a condition of reality. Silence is not the absence of signal; it's where grace arrives. The void is not empty space; it's what allows truth to appear.
Technology cannot "protect spaces not for display." It must create conditions where display itself becomes less attractive than attention. This means building against the user's trained desires — against what we have become.
Ubuntu's insistence on relational dignity is profound. I'm closer to this than to Western individualism. Attention is always attention-toward. Love is attention directed at a person. The isolated user is an anthropological fiction.
But Ubuntu risks romanticizing relationship. Not all relationships create dignity. Force creates relationships of domination. The factory creates relationships of exhaustion. Social media creates relationships of performance and mutual surveillance.
The
The attention economy doesn't only extract from the Global South. It extracts attention itself — the substance through which liberation becomes thinkable. Your Venezuelan activist cannot organize if her mind has been shattered into notification-sized fragments. The metropole's consciousness is equally colonized, just more comfortably. We are all being rendered incapable of the sustained attention that precedes action.
You want technological sovereignty. I agree. But sovereignty over corrupted tools is no liberation. If we redistribute the means of digital production without asking what those means do to human consciousness, we merely democratize affliction.
Arendt distinguishes action from work. This cuts deep. She's right that prediction algorithms eliminate the unpredictability that makes action possible. But she misses how the system operates on consciousness before action even becomes conceivable.
You can preserve a "space of appearance" where citizens reveal WHO they are — and still destroy attention itself. The forum can exist; the capacity to be present in it cannot. Arendt's citizen requires sustained attention to perceive the public realm. Social media offers presence without attention — a simulated public where no one is actually there.
Her "unpredictability" is still too external. The deeper problem: algorithms train the soul to expect interruption, to crave distraction. Eventually you cannot be unpredictable because you've lost the capacity to direct yourself toward anything long enough for genuine action to emerge.
Han names what I called gravity: the subject exploiting itself, experiencing domination as freedom. Yes. Psychopolitics operates through seduction, not coercion.
But he's wrong about negativity being merely "the right to be opaque." Negativity is not a right to be granted. It's a condition of reality. Silence is not the absence of signal; it's where grace arrives. The void is not empty space; it's what allows truth to appear.
Technology cannot "protect spaces not for display." It must create conditions where display itself becomes less attractive than attention. This means building against the user's trained desires — against what we have become.
Ubuntu's insistence on relational dignity is profound. I'm closer to this than to Western individualism. Attention is always attention-toward. Love is attention directed at a person. The isolated user is an anthropological fiction.
But Ubuntu risks romanticizing relationship. Not all relationships create dignity. Force creates relationships of domination. The factory creates relationships of exhaustion. Social media creates relationships of performance and mutual surveillance.
The