alt Hacker NewsI stopped reading after the first sentence. Calling something "inherently political" is a self-fulfilling prophecy and intentionally so. It consistently turns out to be an attempt to lay the groundwork for expropriation. No one called the Internet "inherently political" until people built stuff there that other people wanted to control.
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I agree that “inherently political” is usually a thought terminating cliche. What kinds of technologies are conditionally political?
The internet is a bad counterexample as it originated from a department of defense project and a number of other government programs that focused on communications and military applications.
I mean, all communications technology is inherently political. From the invention of speech and writing, to the printing press, radio, telephone, TV, and now internet and the communication mediums it allows.
This is because speech is inherently political at the end of the day.
It’s a pretty non-controversial claim and argument about the interaction between technology and human society. If you read the post further you’d probably understand what is meant by that phrase. It’s not centered solely around electronics or the internet at all.