technological antisolutions (10. 683)

Albeit belatedly, enlightened to the fact that I worked in a quite well-connected metropolitan area and that taking public transportation was not merely an option but a generally more pleasant alternative than driving, I had had plenty of thoughts about how the train or bus was always going to be a better course of action that any ostensibly emission-free or driverless fetish that I might take on myself, and more so with the hindsight of leaving that environment to now mostly work remotely and not need to venture far from the home office—the mass-transit commute that wouldn’t allow me to dally being the only thing I sometimes miss of the city and work place, I was quite pleased—via JWZ—to have had that feeling validated and articulated by a short essay deriding the sexier innovations as a symptom of political and civic dereliction that lets infrastructure rot and replaces that onus with an unearned and blind faith in tech that’s inuring and leagues off with its last-mile problems from the sort of public engagement that really can save us. What do you think? Technology has a way of estranging societal problems by lulling us into a belief that we are making an active difference.