We've had technology for 150 years now and much has been positive. Consumers could be encouraged to favor quality , responsiveness & longevity .
Cars & appliances have regressed into unreliable, overstimulated and unpresonsive disasters. Much of this is how they are marketed and sold. Cars seem flashy until you own it for a few months .
The author argues for "a restoration of choice: a campaign to ensure analogue alternatives to digital tools."
If you had a viable choice besides a car (like a combination of mass transit, walking, and bike), would you choose it?
But of course most people in the US cannot make that choice because where they live was, over the last century, designed around cars, and often eliminated choices which were present.
Had those choices remained, there would be more pressure on car manufacturers to build better cars.
Consumers alone aren't going to transform cities into a walkable place.
every config parser is a compiler. if platforms (e.g. programming languages) made run-time plugins easier, we wouldn't even have config files.
Imagine a config file with type checking and control flow. You have it-- it's your programming language. you just need to load the code at runtime, like erlang.
You might want to check out Dhall[0], which is a configuration file format that allows a safe-ish subset of functional programming language idioms. Needless to say that it requires a full compiler :)
