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Would this be Hardin's "Lifeboat Ethics"?

Yep!

It's an embarassment that Ostrom's work didn't memory hole this decades ago

People tend to have a very strong idea that ecologically and environmentalism are inherently left-wing or at least liberal. Hardin is an excellent example of how that is not the case.

Those aren’t the kind of problems this saying is about. Tech can’t solve problems where the crux of the problem is how people interact as part of a group. That’s not all social problems.

How people interact as part of a group is one of the things technology is spectacularly good at changing.

For the better?

Because you don't have to convince eight billion primates to acquire better personalities. You can alter the environment so different behavior becomes easier, cheaper, safer, more rewarding, or simply automatic.

Irrigation changes the consequences of drought. Food storage changes the consequences of seasonal scarcity. Contraception changes reproductive choices. Infrastructure can turn behaviors requiring heroic individual coordination into automatic defaults.

Modern scholarship on techno-fixes actually makes this exact point and cautions against defining technological fixes as inherently fallacious, because some plainly can work.

Technology cannot tell us what society ought to want. Technology can very often make what society wants dramatically easier to achieve.

for what it's worth, I was agreeing with you - my point is that banning smart glasses because it lets creeps be creeps as a side effect is not a good idea.

Right but it has to make clear that tech solutions often do solve social problems

It’s like “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I suppose you can just say stuff, doesn’t matter if it has any relation to experience or history, so long as it’s a clever turn of phrase

Right? These tools are sick and definitely capable of house dismantling

Yeah, Audre Lorde was very specific about which tools, which masters, whose house Ironically, erasing her legacy by appropriating the quote is the kind of tool she was referring to