Home » Bono says the Net and cell phones will free us from dictators

Bono says the Net and cell phones will free us from dictators

by admin

On 2 January 2013, on the cover of one of the most authoritative technology magazines in the world, the Technology Review of the MIT of Boston, there was a rock star and not to talk about music.

On the black and white portrait of Bono Vox’s magnetic face there was a headline: Big Data Will Save Politics, big data will save politics. And, in quotation marks, therefore attributed to Bono, a demanding sentence: “Mobile phones, the Internet and the dissemination of information will be a lethal combination for dictators”. Techno-optimism, and even more so techno-solutionism, or the tendency to believe that technological progress will necessarily have positive effects, is a pathology that affects many people, and which has also affected the writer. but yet that sentence from Bono is perfect to photograph a historical moment and the sensational collective oversight that has taken place in the relationship between the Net and democracy, which is much more complex than a lethal mixture for dictatorships as many believed.

The interview is actually more complex and interesting than that single sentence suggests. Bono, for example, praises the gods technological advances on the vaccine front; and warns that technology alone will not be the magic bullet to beat poverty and disease, but it will take the commitment of many in the right direction, “because technology can be used to do good or to do harm”. But in general there is (and we only notice today) an underestimation of the negative effects of social networks, of the polarization of politics, of the spread of fake news, all phenomena that at the time, with Obama in the White House, were not even hypotheses. In fact, Bono says: “The tools that technology offers us enable us to to know and better understand problems that were previously considered unsolvable. Thanks to this data and the knowledge of the problems, we can describe the world we want to live in and then try to make it happen. This is the greatest opportunity that has ever been offered to a generation. This is the truth. Wow “.

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Here, apart from the “wow”, it would be nice to start from here to go further what didn’t work and try to really build it, this better world.

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