I disagree that prisons are a technology, as that doesn't fit the term.
However, even if we were to consider prisons a technology, there are good applications and bad applications. Prisons may be used to keep violent predators away from the civil society they might harm. Prisons may also be used as a deterrent against crime, also beneficial to a civil society. That prisons are used as profit centers by corporations who also have regulatory capture is an evil of the people running those corporations and the corrupt officials who look the other way in order to line their pockets. But neither the good, nor the evil has anything to do with concrete, steel, monitoring systems, and plumbing of a prison.
Humans are good or evil, or sometimes a complicated mixture of both. Shifting the animus to the inanimate shifts the responsibility, and I doubt even clear-thinking religious people would be on-board with that. (I'm not, and I'm religious.)
Action, intent, and agency are human things. Ascribing those things to technology hearkens back to animism not rationalism. The spirit of the river made it jump its banks and flood because the river had an ill temper. The computer was ruthless when it calculated the pay of Bob. That's not how our universe works.
I agree with the premise of "machine-assisted ruthlessness." I simply disagree with the notion that the ruthlessness or oppressiveness is inherent to the tech.
I would absolutely consider prisons a technology, most obviously because we can see human societies where prisons are not a viable technology. If a member of a more primitive tribe starts killing people, the pragmatic solution is to kill them, not incarcerate them. Incarceration imposes technological (e.g. can you build buildings strong enough to hold people involuntarily?) prerequisites and high or extremely high logistical costs (see the cost of housing a prisoner for a year in the UK). You ultimately also need guards and the spare labour in society to be able to allocate to that task instead of potentially more important tasks, like obtaining food. Whether that is feasible will in turn be determined by human productivity in the various fields of production, in the case of food which is determined by the availability of agricultural technology (50% of the UK workforce used to be working on agriculture, now only about 2% to my recollection). Incarceration on the scale we see today is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Obviously such technology can be good or bad.
In my view the IT community falls into the trap of a narrow definition of the term, which now has been supplanted by an even narrower definition where technology just means "IT".
See the other thread above for my thoughts on the latter part. The adoption of a technology is done by the decision of a human. Nobody's claiming that computers have imposed themselves on society...
slowmovintarget|1 year ago
However, even if we were to consider prisons a technology, there are good applications and bad applications. Prisons may be used to keep violent predators away from the civil society they might harm. Prisons may also be used as a deterrent against crime, also beneficial to a civil society. That prisons are used as profit centers by corporations who also have regulatory capture is an evil of the people running those corporations and the corrupt officials who look the other way in order to line their pockets. But neither the good, nor the evil has anything to do with concrete, steel, monitoring systems, and plumbing of a prison.
Humans are good or evil, or sometimes a complicated mixture of both. Shifting the animus to the inanimate shifts the responsibility, and I doubt even clear-thinking religious people would be on-board with that. (I'm not, and I'm religious.)
Action, intent, and agency are human things. Ascribing those things to technology hearkens back to animism not rationalism. The spirit of the river made it jump its banks and flood because the river had an ill temper. The computer was ruthless when it calculated the pay of Bob. That's not how our universe works.
I agree with the premise of "machine-assisted ruthlessness." I simply disagree with the notion that the ruthlessness or oppressiveness is inherent to the tech.
hlandau|1 year ago
Obviously such technology can be good or bad.
In my view the IT community falls into the trap of a narrow definition of the term, which now has been supplanted by an even narrower definition where technology just means "IT".
See the other thread above for my thoughts on the latter part. The adoption of a technology is done by the decision of a human. Nobody's claiming that computers have imposed themselves on society...