“For people like Srinivasan, a vindicating narrative is playing out. A young population craving freedom flocks to new technology, bypassing their oppressive gatekeepers, ultimately to ring in modernity—all while investors enjoy a windfall from a new generation of app users. The invisible hand rightfully triumphs over the iron fist, as it was always meant to be.
This fairy tale allows people who make ungodly sums of money for contributing very little of actual value to society to see their compensation as a just—even modest—reward for changing the world. Like most things rich people tell themselves after the sun goes down, it’s self-serving bullshit.
The structural forces oppressing the most marginalized Saudis in the streets and prisons, it turns out, do not wither in the presence of a 4G data connection. The most popular Saudi accounts on Twitter aren’t bold young entrepreneurs challenging the social order; they’re hardline preachers who tell those young people that they should be put to death if they lay with someone of the same sex. The people who want to punish sinners don’t end their pursuit of heresy once they log on. In fact, Saudi Arabia shows how easily the tools tech entrepreneurs imagine will liberate the world can be bent to the service of oppression of the vulnerable.”
https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/your-app-isnt-helping-the-people-of-saudi-arabia-1790198445
FB: “I also don’t think the paid ass-kissers and tech masters of the universe truly have any idea how apps could fix a national system designed to treat the majority of a nation’s residents as second-class citizens at best, and defective property at worst. Even if they did have benevolent intentions beyond enriching themselves, the systems and technologies they’re so excited about are already tools for the same hateful takfiris they pretend they’re upending. It’ll take more than a car service app to fix a country that was deliberately driven insane.”
No comments:
Post a Comment