Just as Josef K, the protagonist of Kafka's 'The Trial,' awoke one day to discover that he had become part of some unfathomable legal carnival, we, too are frequently waking to discover that the rules of the digital game have once again profoundly changed.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes how rapidly changing digital landscapes can impact our lives, often without warning or understanding.
Evgeny Morozov draws a parallel between Kafka's character, Josef K, who finds himself caught in an incomprehensible legal system, and our own experiences with the unpredictable nature of the digital world. Just as Josef K feels helpless amidst the arbitrary rules of his situation, we similarly face the constant evolution of technology and digital environments that reshape our understanding of reality and our roles within it.
In practice
During a tech conference, when discussing the implications of rapid technology changes.
Technological defeatism - a belief that, since a given technology is here to stay, there's nothing we can do about it other than get on with it and simply adjust our norms - is a persistent feature of social thought about technology. We'll come to pay for it very dearly.
For many oppositional movements, the Internet, while providing the opportunity to distribute information more quickly and cheaper, may have actually made their struggle more difficult in the long run.
I have no problem with technological solutions to social problems. The key question for me is, 'Who gets to implement them?' and, 'What kinds of politics of reform do technological solutions smuggle through the back door?'
The newspaper offers something very different from Google's aggregators. It offers a value system, an idea of what matters in the world. Newspapers need to start articulating that value.
Social media's greatest assets - anonymity, 'virality,' interconnectedness - are also its main weaknesses.
The decentralized nature of online conversations often makes it easier to manipulate public opinion, both domestically and globally. Regimes that once relied on centralized systems of media control can now deliver ideological messages more subtly, with the help of little-known intermediaries like anonymous commenters on websites.
You don't have to be young to learn about technology. You have to feel young.
People have a right to privacy, but they also have a right to live. Fundamentally, we need cybersecurity and need to secure communications as well.
Digital technology can be a great resource, but it can also be a pernicious one, so it's how we, as a society, really study the cognitive impact of that and use evidence-based research to go after the technology designers to do a better job of dealing with the problems of memory and attention we are seeing.
We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.
It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.
Technology enabled Rappler's fast growth starting in 2012, but we were also among the first victims when social media was weaponized in 2016.
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