Is Technology Overrated?
We are invited to behold the benefits of technology, but ignore the costs. Meanwhile, we’ve lost the right to decide what technologies we develop or how they are deployed.
We are invited to blind faith in “technology’—whatever that is, and whatever that means. Some people, who call themselves Techno-Optimists, want to cultivate our faith in all things technological.
As I read the Techno-Optimist Manifesto it is a smorgasbord of strawman arguments and empty rhetoric.
Author Marc Andreessen writes:
“We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology. We are told to be pessimistic … We are told to denounce our birthright – our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world. We are told to be miserable about the future.“
Who is saying this?
If constructive dialogue with a Techno-Optimist is even possible, it’s by getting them to define what they are advocating. What’s the end game? Where are we going with this?
If we cannot agree on a destination or ideals or first principles, then there is little or nothing to talk about. Try getting such people to talk about tens of thousands of children in Congo—and hundreds of thousands of adults—who are enslaved to the cobalt mining industry, on which Silicon Valley rests. Try getting them to notice that most poor people in the world live on land that they do not control and cannot use to grow their own food. Try getting them to be concerned about the rapid decline of insects or wild vertebrates. They get bored and/or offer glib, shallow, false solutions.
I think we need to get people to understand how much we have lost because of technology, and industrial civilization.
Technology, broadly defined, means tools and problem solving. Nothing wrong with that. That’s what is looks like to be human. But this truism has been hacked by people who use technology and people for power, profit and control.
I strongly recommend “Civilized to Death” by Christopher Ryan. He gets us to see what civilization hath wrought, for better and for worse. We will only think clearly when we see the costs, not just the benefits.
Ryan writes: “Within just a few years of unlocking the miracle of flight, pilots were flying with one hand while tossing bombs on civilians with the other. And only in the most progressive modern societies are LGBTQ people and women regaining the acceptance and respect they typically received in most foraging societies. Reports of progress have a tendency to be wildly overstated and uncritically accepted, while anyone who questions the benefits of civilization is liable to be dismissed as cynical, utopian, or some hybrid of both.”
Those who benefit most from technology and civilization constantly sell us on the benefits of both.
But as Ellen Goodman writes: “Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.”
This is not about gloom and doom. It’s about liberation. Maybe we’ll be free when we realize that we spend our most productive years building the prisons that we inhabit.
Technology is great. I’m typing this on an iPhone with a portable Bluetooth keyboard.
But how much technology is our choice? And how much of it is imposed upon us, in a bargain where few recognize the price we really pay.
100 years ago, thinkers like John Maynard Keynes were speculating about what we would do with all our free time, since, as everyone could see, technology would liberate us from the need to work more than a few hours a week.
That didn’t happen. Why? Because we the people are not in control. We are not in charge. We could be. But we are not. We do not get to decide how our society will be shaped. Those decisions are made for us, without our input, and—largely—without our knowledge.
The first step is awareness.
I recommend “Civilized to Death” by Christopher Ryan. I recommend the work of Noam Chomsky, who is freely and widely available on YouTube. That’s a good start.
Technology and fossil fuels make world domination possible. A few people get to determine the size and shape of our economy, as well as the extent to which we are surveilled and controlled. It’s not democracy. But it could be.