The Amish Could Teach Us How to Take Power Back from Tech-Giants
After many years of investing in technologies—including gadgets and services to draw everyone’s attention and to collect people’s data, the tech giants are these days facing an ever-growing backlash.
Mark Zuckerberg—the CEO of Facebook has been long under fire for “programming people’s brains” have on multiple platforms defended his company’s use of data. Soon after the European privacy rules would go into effect that would give the EU consumers much more visibility into what firms know about them.
Now the CEOs of these technology-based firms want to be a part of the solution. Facebook-owned Instagram on Tuesday launched a feature that would permit users to keep a track on the amount of time they are spending on the app.
Also Read: Instagram is experimenting with AR and many more features
A week before, Sundar Pichai—CEO of Google announced a “Digital Wellbeing Initiative” centred at assisting people to limit their use of Google’s products and services by recommending them breaks from YouTube or sending notifications. He quoted the concept of “JOMO—the joy of missing”.
There is no issue in tech giants realizing or appearing to realize their ethics. However, it is worth mentioning that the choice to use technology is ours as well and we could choose differently, just like the Amish.
Before taking on or adapting to any new technology the Amish make use of us as a test, as informed by Jameson Wetmore—an engineer turned social researcher at the Arizona State University. He said that they watch what happens to people in the outside world and then decide if that technology is something they want to dive in or not for themselves. Where Silicon Valley has the concept of value-free technology, the Amish believes that there is no such thing.
Wetmore further indicated that the Amish have also been constantly declining the societies in general numbers. Back in the 60s or 70s seventy-five percent of the Amish children who have become the Amish adults now. Presently the percentage is ninety-five which to some extent is a bit of an impeachment. The Amish have always declined our world and now they are making record numbers in rejecting.
The attitude of Amish or their increasing number would not appear that big to us if the rest of us take technology like the way it should be taken—which is as a choice and not an inescapability. There is no need of going back into past to decide on our own how to allow technology to enter our lives.
More Read: Google Might Have Faked its AI Demo Call as Per New Reports
Research Snipers is currently covering all technology news including Google, Apple, Android, Xiaomi, Huawei, Samsung News, and More. Research Snipers has decade of experience in breaking technology news, covering latest trends in tech news, and recent developments.
