Re: <nettime> Just as rabid as the Unabomber, but safely on the winning side ...

[august <august@alien.mur.at>]

Interesting read.

I'm sympathetic to the driving narrative, and love to point fingers as
much as the next person, but doesn't this article generalize and
speculate way too much about a) what engineering is; which I would
counter-argue is a creative practice full of fuzzy thresholds, complex
emergent behavior, and open-ended problem solving  b) about the
power/influence engineers exert on society-at-large. c) the mind of an
engineer.

The article ends with: "Engineers need to think of their work as both a
humble contribution to the ongoing social order but also as an
imposition—as a normative statement with politics and consequences."

Couldn't you just substitute "Engineers" with designers, educators,
artists, architects, scientists, etc. in the above statement?

Maybe it is the "consequences" part that the author takes issue with,
that the engineers _appear_ to not think about it (as if artists, 
academics, and other professions do and come to the right conclusions)

In that case, what makes the author think that engineers are
disregarding the politics and consequences instead of absorbing them and
taking action based on some other criteria (eg financial necessity,
personal satisfaction of building/creating, subjection to the same
pressures of capital/violence as everything and everyone else, etc.)

In lacking that kind of elaboration, the article seems to blame
engineers not only for the idea of engineered phenomena (roads,
libraries, ipads, facejob, nuclear missiles, voting formats, LSD,
vaccines etc) but also for their coming-into-being and their effects.

I know tech-bro-bashing is very trendy (and fun) right now, but can we
really blame terrorism or pollution on the plane-maker?
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