The Taming of Tech Criticism

The author responds to Morozov's disastrously wrong-heaeded calls for ideological purity in tech critique here -

http://www.roughtype.com/?p=5764

It's easy to agree -

http://www.metareader.org/post/a-litmus-test-for-humanistic-...

This article seems to be saying "Clearly technology is bad, now we just have to figure out a reason it's bad."

This essay makes a point that's new to me-- obvious in retrospect, a simple extension of Orwell: art is propaganda, technology is art, so technology is propaganda-- and technology companies must be propaganda machines. What kind of propaganda are they producing? The thesis of his essay is 'technology critics don't care', which I don't believe.

So can anyone direct me towards socio-political analysis of contemporary technology? We have whole university departments banging their heads on old books and that's great, but has the person yet been born who can deconstruct an app? And I mean deconstruct it vertically, not just on UI design or whatever. Technology company as text... a guy can dream.

Clearly this review was not written with people like me as the intended audience, as the introductory paragraphs were almost completely incomprehensible to me on my first pass through them.

That said, what follows is an excellent argument for why Nicholas Carr's The Glass Cage is terrible. I assume the introduction designed to prime the intended audience* for this argument.

* Which I assume is made up entirely of people whom I'd be very sad to find myself at a cocktail party with (although I expect they'd be similarly sad to find themselves at a cocktail party with me). I'm reminded of Cryptonomicon and Dr. G.E.B. Kivistic.