It is pretty simple.
For an individual, technologies only have value when they somehow make life better.
For a society, the same is also true. A valuable technology improves society.
Using this as a baseline we can see that a technology that sometimes works well but fails very badly at other times is misleading. For some people, the technology works, they see it as valuable. However, for others, when technology fails them, they become frustrated. Some of those failures are catastrophic. It is a negative value.
To really evaluate a technology properly, we need to look at those failures. They define more of its value than the successes.
For example, someone builds an inventory system. Great, now people can quickly see what is on hand. But the digital information in that system drifts from the actual inventory. Sometimes it says stuff is there when it is not. Sometimes it is the opposite. The value for such a system is its reliability, which is its ability to not drift too far from reality. If the drift is significant, the system is unreliable, it has very little value then, in fact, it might be hugely negative. Just smoke and mirrors that misleads people.
We see that with other categories of systems, particularly communications. If a system delivers accurate information, it is valuable. But if it is susceptible to being subverted to deliver misinformation, spin, or propaganda, then its value is low, or even worse it can be a literal threat to a society. It can be controlled by people with a negative agenda.
If people mistakenly trust that system, yet it delivers information that causes them to make tragic mistakes, the value is extraordinarily negative. It is a bad system. Very bad. They blindly trust the information they are getting, but it is actually not correct and controlled by other people who do not have their best interests at heart. It is a tool for mass exploitation, not for enlightenment.
We can verify that a technology is negative by simply looking at it retroactively. If the trajectory of something within the sphere of influence has gone off in a bad direction, and some technology was instrumental in changing that course, then it clearly has negative value. So individual or collective negative acts taint the mediums that influenced them.
If a group of people do something so obviously self-destructive and were driven to do so by use of some questionable technology, it's clear that that technology is bad. Very bad. There is something seriously wrong with it, if it was effective at promoting bad choices.
What we need to do is get better at evaluating technologies and mitigating the effects of any negative technologies on our societies. If we don’t they will eventually be used to bring about our ruin. We went through this with machines too. Initially, they amplified our labor, but then also started to amplify destruction. We still have a lot of confusion about the difference.
