accessibility and technology

The exclusivity of the means is not a defining feature of art as it is of technology. Access to technologies is often restricted.

The advantages art provides are not connected to restrictions to its access. Like culture, art is supposed to be learned and mastered by anyone with enough passion and talent. Technology can give us better colors and better brushes, but we can be artists even using old technologies, or even just rubbish.

Technology on a time scale

Maybe another feature of technology, that distinguishes it from other areas of human development, is that relevant technology is new, because that is the moment when it has the highest impact on society, creating unbalances and strategical privileges that will push markets and society to a different asset.

The technological part of a water mill is not as relevant to trade and politics of our society as it was to society when it was new. It could also be that i got conditioned to consider new technology as superior, and i am blind to the value of old technology.

Technology and politics

In a competition, technology can be seen as something designed to win a strategical advantage over other parties, and as such it must involve some restriction on the access competitors have to it.

This is also interesting because niches are often drivers of political direction, so technology can play a role in the political competition.

This sheds a different light on the use of the term disrupt in combination with the deployment of products coming from new tech.

This is why there are technologies i don’t like and i consider harmful, because they are designed to get an advantage which i consider unfair. I don’t believe in the neutrality of technological development. Technologies are developed towards a direction and with a goal, because developing requires prototyping and iterations, and iterations require feedback, and feedback requires a goal.