Rage Against the Machine

Recently I’ve been having fun presenting a paper entitled “Rage Against the Machine” to IT folks at the Ontario Universities Computing Conference (OUCC 2010) and CANHEIT 2010, the Canadian Higher Ed IT conference. 

The subtitle of the talk is “Recent Classics of Contrarian Tech.” Basically I talk about five books/documents:

Clifford Stoll: Silicon Snake Oil
The Unabomber Manifesto
Bill Joy: The Future Doesn’t Need US
Nicholas Carr: Is Google Making Us Stupid? (The Shallows was just published)
Jaron Lanier: You are Not a Gadget

The idea is that these IT voices have had serious second thoughts about the very technology they previously promoted. Since many of us in IT are cheerleaders for the tech, it is useful  to listen to these folks; people I think of as canaries in the digital coal mine.

The presentations were a delight almost exclusively because the audiences really got into it. Great discussion, debate, dialogue and outright disagreement.

Here’s the link to the video from OUCC.

...Mike