This Luddite Puppet Hopes You’re Not Reading This on Your Smartphone

Keep yourself open to, “OK, I’m gonna look around. Is there a Luddite poster here? I’m at my local bookstore. OK, is there some information here?” It’s this idea of social infrastructure, switching people over from the idea of, “OK, I’ll look at an Instagram page, and here’s all the events” to the idea of, “I actually have to leave my house.” Be on the lookout. We’ll be out here. Tompkins Square Park, probably, other parks, privately owned public spaces. We have events all over this city. It’s amazing. Knicks in five. I love New York.

Gowanus, we like to play a little game on each show.

I love games.

We’re very proud of it. It’s called Control, Alt, Delete. So I wanna know what piece of tech you would love to control, what piece you would alter or change, and what you would delete, or vanquish from the earth.

Wow.

Are you ready?

Control, Alt, Delete. OK, great.

Let’s start with control.

This is so funny that you’re asking me this. I would say the servers for the internet.

The internet was billed as something that was, OK, we are going to have a free exchange of knowledge across the world. It’s going to help diversity and globalization and all this stuff, and then, boom. Military technology, right?

We saw this with Ed Snowden, essentially.

OK. And now alt.

I’m trying to think about which technologies do I feel have a real positive impact, but have a negative sort of profit incentive.

Let me give this one. I would alter the way that social media platforms have a centralized system instead of a federated system. I think that’s pretty solid, and this was almost in the creation of Twitter, they were about to do this. And then Jack Dorsey was like, “No, we should have it be more centralized.”

And finally, delete.

I can’t wait. This is my favorite one.

What would you delete?

AI. AI data centers. Done. Done. Immediately done. Boom. Gone. I mean, come on, guys.

Come on. Especially when they bill it as, “OK, we’re gonna make an AI to fix all of our climate catastrophe, all of our income inequality, but first, we have to absolutely drain the natural resources of the Earth.” I mean, it’s just ridiculous. It just makes me so frustrated. I think the data center is honestly one of the worst materializations of this Big Tech oligarch world that we live in.

Where like the whim of Mark Zuckerberg wanting a Meta Hyperion data center in Louisiana is legitimately going to use multiple times the amount of energy that New Orleans uses. We can’t sustain that as a planet, truly. It doesn’t matter how interesting the technology is or what it could do. These are resources that we need now for life to continue. We need fresh water. We need land to grow food. We need ecosystems where birds and bees and wildlife can coexist, and I’m not very interested in trading that for a chatbot, even if the chatbot tells me it loves me and we can kiss through the phone.

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