alt Hacker NewsTechnology cannot solve social problems. Societies can solve social problems using technology, just as they can without using technology, but ultimately it is the society that solves the problem.
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If tech can cause social problems (there are multiple books on this) then it can solve them too - the only modern tech industry we've ever known has been dominated by players attempting forms of lockin to capture rents and amass enormous fortunes, of course the technology of this society isnt generally helpful to the society at large.
Yep. The event in Egypt that this article opened with is an example of a state of exception, and it has been used effectively by rulers for a long time. Not just autocrats, but, even more importantly, by elected members of a government with checks and balances, as a way to bypass those checks and balances. The phrase was coined by a Nazi philosopher who proceeded to lay out the groundwork for the subversion of a constitutional parliament, which then worked effectively. It has been picked up by others like Agamben to analyze similar things throughout history (the Patriot Act for one).
It's fundamentally not a matter of technology.
Hmm... technology sure seems to create, or at least to expose, a lot of societal problems, and does solve a lot of problems in exchange for a lot of money. Not sure the true rule is as stated.