💬 On the Utility Fallacy
The point too often missed in a cooly instrumentalist understanding of technology is that we don’t use these tools in a vacuum; we instead participate in complicated social systems that can careen in unforeseen directions when powerful new technological forces are introduced. Features are important, but they’re not the whole story.
I think that the problem of utility comes back to the idea that technology is a system. I liked how Ian Guest captured this in his these on Twitter, especially where he ‘interviewed’ the non-human actors.