Technology as the Vehicle of Change and Elites' Dominance.
Technology as the Vehicle of Change and Elites' Dominance.
If we consciously skip the earlier phases of history just to arrive at the modern industrial economy we see the larger industrial economy has so many other streams within itself. Trade, industry, telecommunication, digitization , Artificial Intelligence , Genetic engineering and quantum computation are just a few of them . Industrialization brought significant amount of wealth but at the same time it also brought a new type of inequality. Earlier politically empowered were also economically empowered and others had neither of the two, but industrialization resulted into democracy and capitalism. This provided political power even to those who have not economic power but due to political power economically pauperazied classes carved their way into economic prosperity or at least these classes could succeed in claiming pie in the progress made on the economic front. Progress became a mass phenomenon which was earlier confined to the elites. Ideals of democracy provides notion of equality and freedom and capitalism sprang into both cooperative and conflicting economic progresses.
However with the progress of time internal contradictions of both capitalism and democracy and seesaw relation between cooperation and conflict has been producing some more dratic consequences which understanding would reveal the relationship.between technology and economic progress via democracy.
Technology has impacted the systems of economy and polity in such drastic ways that both areas have started direct interaction with the common people. But elites have been smart enough to take steps for controlling digital data, markets including digital markets, and for creating a very vast, complex and convincing ecosystem of falsification. Mistrust and control are major instruments to dehumanize the technology. Once technology get one particular master it's fruits get circumvented. Control over technology results into limited availability of the same. So democratic character of tech system transforms into a large web of oppression. And in consequence technology adds fuel to the process of fall of democracy. By limiting to the access of technology, by creating artificial boundaries for recognition of tech qualifications, by controlling the vast pool of digital data, by allowing misuse of the personal data, by adopting surveillance and by other means powerful politica class ensures that mass productivity of technology fails to deliver and public in general grow a hateful vengeance for technology. General public is taught to be convinced that tech is not for their good. This creates artificial gap between the technology and it's beneficiaries and allows only a handful of people to enjoy the fruits of technology. So in the first place it appears that technology is creating inequality whereas the reality is that it's the power structure which prevents technology from becoming equalizer.
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