(/ˈæ.fə.ɹɪzm̩/)
Noun
1. A short, pithy phrase conveying some principle or concept of thought
… The anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour once quipped that technology is society made durable, by which he meant that social values are embedded in technologies: for example, Google’s PageRank algorithm is deemed ‘democratic’ because, among many other factors, it counts links (and links to sites making links) as votes. Like politicians with votes, the pages with the most links rank the highest. The internet appears a vehicle of liberty, democracy and commerce today in part because it cemented itself in our popular imagination just as Western values appeared to triumph in the wake of the Cold War. The Soviet internet story also reverses Latour’s aphorism: so too is society technology made temporary. In other words, as our social values shift, so will what appears obvious about technology.
From the post OGAS, the Soviet Union’s 1960s-era internet system
Source: How the Soviets invented the internet and why it didn’t work (aeon.co)
