I have been deep into the archives of the State Library of South Australia, mostly looking at papers (magazines, newsletters etc) from the second half of the 1960s through the 1970s.
No, I am not a strange strange man. Why do you ask?
Anyway, this was the period, as the ‘Great Acceleration’ slowed slightly, where the costs of progress were beginning to become apparent, where the pile of debris before us was growing skyward and beginning to blot out the nice view. For those with eyes and spines to see.
And people, some people, could see where “it” (computation, measurement, the iron laws of rationality etc etc) all might lead.
“The alternatives are stark. Either we will have a future in which humans are reduced to a sort of bee-like behaviour, reacting to the systems and equipment specified for them, or we will have a future in which masses of people, conscious of their skills in both a political and technical sense, decide they are going to the architects of a new form of technological development which will enhance human creativity and mean more freedom of expression.”
Mike Cooley, ‘Architect or Bee? The Human/Technology Relationship.’
But ‘we’, the good guys who could see all this, were no match for the enacted inertia, for the forces pushing for a reversion to the mean (I mean mean in both senses).
And here we are, on a burning platform with absolutely no idea of how to sustain even a howl of rage, let alone build any viable infrastructure of dissent.
Would those earnest intelligent writers of the 1960s and 1970s be surprised? Disappointed, yes. Shocked and appalled yes. But I suspect not terribly surprised. They had seen murder and ecocide against Vietnam, nothing much could shock them, I guess?
PS The adverts for various forms of AI slop-generators on Youtube are all about being in charge, being the architect. Of course they are. They are trying to sell bee-dom to people who need to think of themselves as not-bees.
marchudson.net 
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