I recently shared 52 warning signs that technological progress is reversing. By my measure, this reversal started happening around a decade ago. If I had to sum things up in a conceptual chart, it would look like this:
The divergence was easy to ignore at first. We’re so familiar with useful tech that many of us were slow to notice when upgrades turned into downgrades. But the evidence from the last couple years is impossible to dismiss. And we can’t blame COVID (or other extraneous factors) any longer. Technology is increasingly making matters worse, not better—and at an alarming pace. I’ve now provided extensive (and, I believe, irrefutable) evidence of this in a series of articles. Here are links to a few of them. But I have avoided answering, up until now, the biggest question—which is why is this happening? If you want to support my work, please take out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).Or, to be more specific, why is this happening now? Until recently, most of us welcomed innovation, but something changed. And now a huge number of people are anxious and fearful about the same tech companies they once trusted. What caused this shift? That’s a big issue. Unless we understand how things went wrong, we can’t begin to fix them. Otherwise we’re just griping—about bad software or greedy CEOs or whatever. It’s now time to address the causes, not just complain about symptoms. Once we do that, we can move to the next steps, namely outlining a regimen for recovery and an eventual cure. So let me try to lay out my diagnosis as clearly as I can. Below are the ten reasons why tech is now breaking bad. I apologize in advance for speaking so bluntly. Many will be upset by my frankness. But the circumstances—and the risks involved—demand it. 10 Reasons Why Technological Progress Is Now Reversing(1) Instead of pursuing truth, new technologies aim to replace it with mimicry and fantasy.Not long ago, scientists wanted to understand reality. That was true whether their names were Newton and Einstein, or Hewlett and Packard—who established Silicon Valley by building test and measurement equipment. How quaint, test and measurement devices!—which humbly respect the essence of the real world. Could you imagine our leading tech CEOs today wasting their time on measuring the world? Instead they want to create their own universe (or multiverse or cyberspace, to use the fashionable jargon)—and force the rest of us to live in it. So, in the last decade, the largest tech investments have gone into creating fantasy and unreality. Trillions are spent on virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Tech has lost its reverence for the real, and now hungers to displace it with its own Frankenstein creations.
Never before in human history has the fake been given such precedence over the authentic. This has created an ontological crisis in society, at a scale that previous opponents of everyday reality (Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, etc.) could hardly imagine. (2) This has empowered shamming, scamming & spamming at unprecedented levels.Have you noticed people complaining about fake news or fake videos or fake images? Or maybe you know somebody who got catfished by a fake girlfriend or fake boyfriend? Or perhaps you deal yourself with phishing attempts, emails scams, bots spreading disinformation, etc.? Of course, you do. The phony stuff is everywhere. Sometimes I think that’s how they named the iPhone—for all the phony stuff it now delivers every day, every hour. That’s inevitable when innovation is focused almost entirely on fantasy and fakery. The lies and scams aren’t just side effects, they are the main course. This is precisely what the trillion dollars of investment in the artificial and the virtual is supposed to deliver. So the widespread use of AI for classroom cheating is exactly what we should expect. And the same is true of all those fake news articles, fake music tracks, fake books, fake images, fake videos—all pretending to be authentic human creations. When Big Tech makes fakery their highest priority, lies reach epidemic proportions. We are now living with the consequences. And if tech accelerationists get their way, the deceptions will get much, much worse—and very rapdily. (3) Users are not the real customers—so billions of people must suffer to advance the interests of a tiny group of stakeholders.We should have been suspicious when all the web platforms let us use them for free. As Robert Heinlein once warned, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Eventually you must pay. That time has now arrived. There was a honeymoon period during the early web years, when users were treated as members of a community. But once the digital platforms achieved quasi-monopoly status, those friendly days were over.
These enormous businesses really do have customers, but they aren’t you and me. Those real customers are mostly corporations who pay either (1) to influence us with ads, or (2) to gain access to private information about us. Anything else they do is just pretense and window-dressing. The system is designed to benefit a tiny number of stakeholders, not the users—and certainly not society or the culture. This simply could not have happened in an earlier day, when the economy was built on the sale of goods and services to actual consumers. Back then, businesses served the public—they had no other option. By destroying that fundamental relationship, the door was opened to all sorts of abuses. (4) Real people become inputs in a profit-maximization scheme which requires that they are constantly controlled and manipulated.Given all this, we shouldn’t be surprised when the largest companies in the world totally ignore what we want. They make money by manipulating us and spying on us—end of story. If you aren’t paying for the product, that means you probably are the product. Here again, the abuses in the system are intentional—this is not a flaw in the system, but actually how it has been designed. And the situation will only get worse (unless something else intervenes). But what happens when billions of users are manipulated and deceived to benefit corporate interests? That’s easy to answer: Tech progress starts reversing, as we now experience on a daily basis. (5) In this environment, everything gets viewed as a resource or input and the natural world (including us) is ruthlessly exploited.Philosopher Martin Heidegger warned about this seventy years ago. In a prescient essay entitled The Question Concerning Technology, he discerned that the tech mindset views everything as a resource to be exploited. This is now becoming obvious to everybody. At first, the natural world was exploited, but now it’s people too. Everything gets turned into an input, and is drained of all intrinsic or higher value. Let me offer an example. Consider a mountain. What was once a sacred spot for encountering the divine gradually gets turned into a resource for manipulation and control. Here’s what that process looks like:
Now imagine what this same chart would look like if you substitute people for the mountain. Or you don’t need to imagine—just consider your own evolving relationship with the tech-driven world that surrounds you. (6) The groundwork for this was laid by theorists who replaced truth with power.It’s tempting to ignore academics and intellectuals, or even laugh at their bizarre theories. But this time they actually accomplished something—setting the foundation for our current crisis over a period of 30-40 years. Postmodernism started as a fringe academic movement, which mocked notions of truth and value, showing how these terms were typically just a smokescreen for brutal power relationships. Over time, it became the dominant worldview at our leading universities. Hey, it was a useful analytical tool—and many of us (me included) learned a lot from Foucault and other postmodernists, as they showed how knowledge gets turned into an authoritarian tool. I thought that was valuable, because seeing these abuses should make it easier to stop them. But it didn’t work out that way. Something ugly happened instead. Instead of criticizing and debunking these abuses, a whole generation of smart people started imitating them. It was an easy game to learn: You pretend to be truthful, but use this to build your own empire. And if there is no truth, why not use the concept of truthfulness as just one more tool for your personal advantage? Academics were probably the first to figure this out—playing deceptive power games with data. But these techniques inevitably infiltrated into the broader culture over the course of a generation. A contempt for truth went mainstream—despite constant lip service to honesty—and everything got justified (secretly) in terms of power. If you haven’t noticed this, you’re either easily duped—or have been asleep for the last 20 years. Technocrats inevitably got corrupted by the destruction of truth for the purpose of power. And it’s hard to blame them—the pursuit of truth has become a sad joke throughout society. And the CEOS of tech companies probably have more to gain (financially) from lying than anybody else. (7) In the past, governments controlled huge technologies (nuclear power, spaceships, etc.) so they were somewhat accountable to citizens, but now the most powerful new tech is in private hands, and the public good is no longer even considered.Something else changed a few years ago. Until recently, the big tech initiatives were controlled by government. Much of the information was classified, and profits weren’t the goal. The space program was pursued almost entirely for disinterested motives—not much different than climbing the mountain in the chart above. In other instances, research was done for weapons and defense. This was dangerous, but at least there was some accountability—if only via elections. And politicians felt a commitment to the common good, at least on some level. Most new tech came from these collective initiatives. Even the Internet was created by the US Department of Defense.
I’m suspicious of government, but I’m even more suspicious of new tech that aims to serve a tiny number of private individuals. Believe it or not, it’s actually easier to change the President or political regime than replace Mark Zuckerberg at Meta. (I’m not exaggerating, he literally cannot be fired by the Board, or anyone else.) Now every aspect of tech is like a Las Vegas casino—with a small group of stakeholders rolling the dice and trying to hit a jackpot. You and I are just chips on the table. (8) So much wealth is concentrated in the hands of the winners in these processes, that they literally become more powerful than nation states.Over time, this approach to monetizing tech turned the leading technocrats into the wealthiest individuals in the history of the world. In many instances, these elites are more powerful than nation states. I now read news stories every week about a tech CEO defying a head of state or court ruling or some other government mandate. And as they acquire more wealth and power, they become increasingly detached from all aspects of the real world. Their utterances get stranger and stranger. That might be okay, except that they have the power to turn their feverish dreams and fantasies into our realities. Even their craziest most dysfunctional plans get launched—just like one more billionaire’s spaceship. And the rest of us have to deal with the fallout. (9) With this shift in power, even the most independent politicians turn into controlled agents working for the technocracy — making a mockery of democracy.When has the US government ever stopped any of them? The short answer is: Never. I can only conclude that these individuals are now more powerful than the law. It would be easy for legislators to require disclosures of fake AI stuff. But it never happens. The government could also stop corporate surveillance, the sale of private information, manipulative closed systems, malicious upgrades, forced tech linkages, and all the rest. But they don’t. We could have honesty, transparency, and accountability tomorrow. But nobody in DC even dares. It’s not hard to figure out why. It’s expensive to run a political campaign—and serious candidates need a coalition of billionaires. This makes a mockery of democracy, because a tiny number of people have more influence than all the rest of us combined. So there are no checks and balances—only checks, made payable to your current and future political leaders, for services rendered. If you don’t think this is true, you are already living in one those altered realities they’re peddling in Silicon Valley.
(10) If you oppose this command-and-control tech you can be theoretically (and often literally) erased, suspended, deplatformed, shadow-banned, surveilled, de-banked, digitally faked, etc. —so who will dare?The system is self-reinforcing. The technocracy has created a world in which we are forced to use their web platforms—just to do our job and get through our daily chores. So if we annoy them too much, they can literally lock us out of our own life. Take a look at China to see how extreme these controls can get. We are still in a much earlier stage of constraint and manipulation in most Western democracies. But you can already find tech platforms punishing their enemies, and this behavior increases each year. Do you think I’m exaggerating? Just consider how much more manipulative and controlling tech has gotten in the last decade—and then extrapolate out another ten years. The trendline could hardly be more obvious, and there’s no reason to trust authorities to step in to fix matters. They are more likely to facilitate and participate. A FINAL BIT OF GOOD NEWS That said, we still have considerable power as individuals. That’s the weakness in the technocracy. Every one of those tech abuses requires users — there’s a reason why those word have a similar etymology. In the final analysis, these digital empires only exist with our willing participation. And if you are a ‘content creator’ (ugh!), you have even greater power to disrupt the system. All the big web platforms rely on the willing contributions of individuals. Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and all the rest still require humans like us. These platforms are just intermediaries. They require us at both ends of the business system—as creators and consumers. Without us, their entire economic model collapses. The people running these empires understand this vulnerability. That’s why they are working so hard to replace human creativity with AI imitations. They know that their platforms die without our support, and want to find a way to reduce this dependency. That’s why I’ve chosen to operate on an independent publishing platform that rewards writers and artists—and makes sure that almost 90% of cash goes to human creators. There are no advertisers. There’s no outside interest standing between me and the reader. It feels like a community. Maybe you’ve noticed that too. This is the healthy alternative to the rot. And Substack is hardly the only renegade bucking the system—other healthy, culture-building organizations and platforms are out there. They deserve our support. Every time one of us switches from a dominant centralized platform to one of these alternative grassroots communities, the culture heals in a meaningful way. In the future, I will write about other ways we can fix this mess. I do believe it can be fixed. It must be. I also have reasonable hopes that even these uncontrolled billionaires, despite all their resources, will fail in their abusive ventures. There’s already evidence of that. In some ways, we might even benefit from their greed—because these people tend to be so lacking in values and purpose, that they will reverse course if their schemes fail to generate the piles of cash they covet. For the time being, each of us has a responsibility to put our own values into practice. Don’t underestimate the cumulative power this represents. You're currently a free subscriber to The Honest Broker. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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