i think this should honestly be the next thing i write over 280 chars about https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1333982231010836481

putting your faith in "political solutions" means having unrealistic expectations about imposing your will on a large mass of people that disagree with you

technology is guaranteed to do one thing and one thing only, and its to change the boundary conditions around political problems.

for example: we have the vaccine. there is now something that exists independently of political failures that will, at some point, bring things back to semblance of normality.

prior to the vaccine announcement, it was much harder to know how that process would occur and get baseline ideas of when.

most criticisms of solutionism mostly seem to be implicitly based off of theory of change in which someone imposes their will on the public via massive political and cultural change

but hoping for this seems to be just as silly as expecting scientists to come up with a vaccine for evil or whatever

i share a lot of the skeptical intuitions tech critics have, the problem that i have is that they're only applied in a one-sided way

e.g they apply it to elon musk but never themselves

and to me there's really no difference between "we can solve social problems if we only had the right technology" and "we can solve social problems if only we had the political will"

unfortunately given what 2020 has revealed about prospects for political and institutional cooperation in the US we will likely need to attack a lot of social problems via indirect routes

i think its kind of obvious that a country in which basic physical infrastructure is either stagnant or decaying but is massively innovating in new virtual gadgets for people to troll each other with

could maybe try rectifying that balance as one of the indirect routes.