Who's in control?

The most disturbing thing about the myriad of texts for this week was Slavin's image of land being blown up to lay a cable that transmits algorithms from New York to Chicago "faster."

I have a rich uncle who got rich working for Goldman Sachs. He no longer works for them, but he has a giant mansion in Atlanta. I never really understood what he did, but I know it involved the stock market.

The stock market is where algorithms make money. There are no products or services, there's just exploitation. I guess the original money of the companies in the stock market probably came from products or services, but I don't think that has much to do with their value on the stock market. I don't understand it much.

When I was in high school, a graduate of the University of Alaska - Fairbanks came to talk in one of my classes. He was an economics major, or something like that. He had a success story for us—he had learned how to exploit the stock market and made a bunch of money, because he had gone to college to learn how to do so. So now, he didn't really have to worry about working (but I'm sure he had some job exploiting the stock market).

Is that a good example for the youth?

The U.S. government spent a bunch of money bailing out the banks a few years ago, another example of promoting making money from money and algorithms, not actually producing a product or helping people in any way. And it didn't help at all, we're just further in the hole.

Again, I don't know that much about this stuff—I'm just going to be a high school teacher. I must be pretty dumb because teachers barely make enough money to support themselves.

But that's all I really need to be happy, anyway.

Heffernan's article also relates to this idea of algorithms dictating peoples' lives. AOL apparently doesn't really want to offer a service, it just wants to figure out how to get the most advertising revenue and the prestige of a high rank on Google (again we see how Google rules the world). The sad thing is that people buy into it—advertisers and writers and the people who run AOL who thought it was a good idea.

The commodification of algorithms, the stock market, and Google rankings are just a few examples of how technology is getting a little too powerful for humans to keep under control. It's not the technology itself that is dangerous, it's the way people covet it. I honestly can't believe that laying a fiber-optic cable from NYC to Chicago to transmit algorithms for one company was even allowed to happen. That is the farthest thing from "sustainable" that I have ever heard of.

Technology is great, but how much of it is really necessary? How much of it is sustainable? Does producing a Kindle take more resources than producing the books people might buy instead of getting the electronic versions?

Do we really need all of this technology to be happy?

I know that I rely on technology every day and blah blah blah, I'm too young to remember life without technology. But I do think that we could be happier and more sustainable if we stepped back and tried to live more simply, without such heavy reliance on technology.

Do we control technology, or does technology control us?