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A Technocratic Plague
Matt Martin
Oppressive systems created by governments, corporations, and militaries need designers to service them, from research, ideation, production, delivery, installation, and maintenance. Even when designers produce work that supports poor and marginalized individuals and groups that aims to address toxic issues in their communities, it is often done at the behest of a system causing the toxicity in the first place. A Technocratic Plague presents a critique of design’s liabilities and an exploration of possible approaches that respond to the toxic world that design has created. If there can be adequate responses to the technocratic plague, what do they look like, and how do they function? An agonistic approach suggests an awareness of the endlessly steep climb to find cures, but if the market and federal entities in the neoliberal sub-democracies of the Euro-American and Asian countries have what seems to be endless power, what other approaches can we bring to this fight? If we are to design for this perpetual conflict, where do we begin? The first and only stop on the brief journey depicted on this web page is the IDENTIFY/CONTROL PLATFORM DECONTAMINATION SYSTEM, an analog/digital system that allows the operator to siphon image and copy data from a website, then deconstruct using four unique modes: mix, layout, ad, and text. To assist in this decontamination, text from A Technocratic Plague is used to filter the content in varying levels of intensity. An additional application constructs a 20th century-friendly gridded structure to showcase the work of the I/CPDS.

The I/CPDS Control Unit

The I/CPDS In-Lab Display
Featuring both the primary I/CPDS display and automatic indexing display.

The I/CPDS Mix Mode
nytimes.com

The I/CPDS Mix Mode
ebay.com

The I/CPDS Mix Mode
usatoday.com

The I/CPDS Layout Mode
walmart.com

The I/CPDS Ad Mode
foxnews.com

The I/CPDS Text Mode
politico.com

The I/CPDS Indexing Showcase
The work of our beloved operator.