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Thanks for writing this. As a former tech VC, I think your point that many of the interesting companies you cited as often funded differently matters in their overall relationship to growth and how they treat their employees. I’m eager to learn more about Reboot and help out if I can. Thanks for having the courage to write this!

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thanks for sharing, Jasmine 🙏🏼

i look forward to learning more about your techno-optimism...

i'd also like to put my recent post (re: digital heroin) on your radar. https://opentochange.substack.com/p/growing-up-before-digital-heroin

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I like this this project, and the attempts to find a way to push technological development forward in a way that doesn't replicate the manifold flaws of the techno-utopianists. Democratisation of power must happen within the design, development and delivery of technologies.

Yet I find that lingering problems of the technologist's mindset remain, and ones that are often associated with technological optimism.

These problems can be viewed through how the philosopher Heidegger's (who I think has been referenced here before) talked about them. He said the modern world is 'revealed' to us not as something with its own integrity and purpose, but rather as a resource or 'standing reserve' to exploit. But it's so much more than this for current technologists, because they see the world 'revealed' to them via digital tech, which for, them, appears as unlimited and undeniably efficacious in application (I go on about that here: https://disassemble.substack.com/p/menopause-is-a-problem-lets-fix-it) .

The issue with technologists (and as a UX designer / User researcher, I include myself here), but especially for tech optimists who I've come across, is that they cannot extricate themselves from this mindset. For them, the world they come into, including the language, infrastructure and habits prefigures how a perceived situation (from the financial, to the social to the environment) will unfold. Problems are created and tech is inevitably the answer. You might call this solutionism - but it's more than that, because it's also about the creation and abstraction of problems. I think it's fairly evident why this itself is a problem.

In order to counter this, the entire 'background' that enables this way of thinking needs to be questioned - which is hard when assumes the outlook of the optimist. It's only then that it's much easier to imagine that there are ways of being in the world - aligning, situating, de-growing, or simply doing less ('Design for the Pluriverse' is a good book that references these ideas).

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