Audio lecture recorded for the online Designs of the Oppressed (2021) course.
Summary: Can technology oppress or liberate people? This lecture introduces the Philosophy of Technology of Álvaro Vieira Pinto in dealing with this question. Vieira Pinto wrote extensively about cybernetics, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and virtual reality’s role in mediating race, class, and colonial oppression, anticipating in the 1970s what STS scholars in other countries did in the 1980s and much later. He concludes that technology can be either oppressive or liberating, depending on the intentions of the social groups that design them. The lecture ends by describing how the Digital Culture Movement, led by musician Gilberto Gil, appropriated technology through anthropophagy to liberate endangered popular cultures.