When the tech revolution began - by my reckoning sometime in the 1990s with the arrival of the personal laptop, followed by the I-phone in 2007 - I was pretty thrilled. The universe on your lap, then in your pocket. Infinite information, communication and entertainment. Doubts were being raised from the beginning in some quarters, mainly about diminishing attention spans, but they said that about TV. Oh and wasn’t there a scare about ear cancer? Anyway, I was fully on board. Let tech rip!
Now I’m not so sure. Last week I went to a talk by Paul Kingsnorth, one of the most brilliant anti-tech writers we have ( although ‘anti-tech’ shortchanges him as a writer, since he has been an eco-activist, a theologian, a Wiccan priest and much besides). Paul lives in Ireland, where he practises the Christian Orthodox faith. In other words, he is largely concerned with spiritual matters and what tech is doing to our souls.
Paul talks of the growing dominance of ‘The Machine’, or the ‘Total System’ which if you search his Substack Posts, he expounds on at fascinating length. I cannot do justice to his thought here but if you search ‘Abbey of Misrule’ on Substack you can find much deep and fascinating reflection on the subject.
The central thrust of his argument is that whereas once, in our collective imaginations, we envisaged the coming of the machines as robots coming to self-consciousness and attacking us with hardware - a fantasy that stretches back from the beginning of the machine age, well before the information revolution - we are being colonised instead from the inside. The robots - and I mean all forms of AI - are not bossing us about with ray guns, but with algorithms that tap into our neural processes and produce mechanical thinking instead of organic human thinking.
It is a domination by the robots that is far more subtle than any fantasy ‘The Terminator’ conjured. It is the future as envisioned by Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ rather than Orwell’s 1984. Power is not wielded by brute force but by the manipulation of the pleasure principle - soft power, you might say. If the robots are colonising us, we are welcoming our slavery, because it makes things easy and makes us feel good. Press a button and we can get anything we want, either virtual or actual. All our appetites and desires can be fulfilled more or less immediately, thanks to technology. All we need is the money to pay for it, which, like information itself, has become an abstraction, a sequence of numbers hidden in an electronic brain we cannot quite understand.
And so we become submissive and compliant in the face of all the goodies being thrust at us. We marvel at the latest shiny gadget and we want to own it. We hunger for VR, we can’t wait for our electric self-driving car. Life no longer has to have meaning because we have stuff. Such a mindset has long been peddled by the forces of capitalism, but tech has turned those forces into turbo-capitalism. Tech giants like Zuckerberg, Gates and Musk seem more in charge of the world than any politician. They can cancel presidents and possess the wealth of small countries. In fact, increasingly, they have the wealth of large countries.
We sometimes generate friction with the robots, even though on the whole we are willing slaves. We find, to our frustration, that our application for a loan is decided by a computer, not a bank manager. The robot operator who answers our phone calls and takes us through endless infuriating preordained stages before we can speak to a human being, a human being who himself or herself is sitting at a screen and being guided by computers. The SatNav that goes rogue, sending us up a blind alley, the faulty check-out terminals in shops instead of people who will interreact with us. It’s all annoying but it’s worth it - isn’t it?
I’m not so sure. Apart from obvious horrors like the Post Office scandal, in which hundreds of innocent postmasters were prosecuted because of a glitch in the Post Offices IT system, being driven by dopamine hits deliberately designed by an algorithm to generate responses and conflict ( because conflict drives hits and likes) is closer to being hypnotised than I would like. The cameras that watch us every moment of the day make me increasingly uneasy - for ‘security’ yes, but if we ever got an extreme government, right or left, think how vulnerable we would be to total surveillance and therefore total control.
Then there are the traces left by our computers and smartphones, our ‘electronic footprint’. I’m sure many of you will have had the eerie experience of, say, going to a shop to buy one product, and finding, back at your home on the computer or phone, similar products popping up as you browse. Sometimes I think I only need to mention a product and it will appear on my feed ( Alexa, my little Amazon talking friend, may not be as deaf as she pretends to be).
Whenever I mention any of my concerns to my children, they usually dismiss them as old man’s paranoia or simply as being archaic. They seem thoroughly at ease with the universe of Instagram, BeReal, TikTok and so on and so on. They certainly spend enough time on it, and have a lot of fun doing so, depending on how you define fun.
I admit, they seem far from dehumanised by this process - except in one respect. Their generation, at least the ones I meet, all seem to think much the same thing about everything. Because they live in similar tech bubbles, and only hear opinions that reflect their own. They go down similar rabbit holes. They hear similar ‘facts’ , pre-selected for them. Any attempt to deviate from their collective narrative seems to be met with either indifference or anger.
This worries me. These particular rabbit holes the tech generation populate may ( or may not) be liberal and well-meaning, but they are also, in a way, vaguely totalitarian. They seem to brook no disagreement. And this would make sense - tech has divided the world into goodies and baddies, with little space for shades of grey. My father’s mantra when I was growing up was ‘there’s two sides to every story’. But now it seems there are so many sides to every story, all available on the Internet, that for cultural and psychological comfort, one has to pick a side and stick with it whatever the facts ( and given there are an infinite amount of facts to choose from, it’s easy to do).
My approach to information is in line with my father’s principle. I read The New Statesman and The Guardian. I also read the Spectator and Unherd. I’ve even been known to pick up a copy of the Daily Mail, albeit with metaphorical rubber gloves. As a result, I float somewhere around the middle on most issues ( the classic ‘centrist dad’ which oddly became a term of abuse around a decade ago). But the middle is not a bad place to be. And it isn’t to be confused with blandness of opinion. I have opinions that could be considered controversial on both sides of the political divide. The middle doesn’t mean consensus. It means making up your own mind and considering all the arguments, then standing on principle, however unpalatable, until a better argument or new facts come along.
But tech seems to have pushed this Enlightenment ideal into the long grass. We are distracted, we are divided and, I would argue, we are finally alienated from ourselves. Unlike Paul Kingsnorth, I don’t fancy upping my bags and living in a remote corner of Ireland to escape The Machine. But I do believe there is something called the human spirit and that it is slowly being replaced by the machine spirit, which is digital, that is, 1 or 0, that is, good or bad, right or wrong.
My solution? I have none ( and neither does Paul Kingsnorth). The process has gone too far for collective action to halt it. All you can do is have your personal, interior revolution. Spend more time off-grid. When you are on-grid, don’t stay in the same bubble all the time. Roam into unfamiliar territory and see what you find. Spend time in silence, without distraction. Meditate. Visit a church occasionally, even if you don’t believe. Don’t let the Total System swallow you whole. Because it will spit you out again, and there won’t be much left of you.
Kingsnorth goes so far as to say that The Machine - the collective forces of scientific, left-brain thinking, and endless technical innovation - are the modern equivalent of a great demonic force, gradually dominating our world. Once I would have laughed at such a view, at least when I first got to play with my iPhone. Now it doesn’t seem so funny anymore.
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One thing that is clear is that, while the world is debating 'should we?', someone already has. The incredible rate of innovation is, as always, driven by humanity's old friends of a lust for money and power. I am rather less pessimistic about the future: no matter how amazing tech gets, the messy physical world with all its uncertainty will interfere, human stupidity and hubris (as opposed to artificial intelligence) will get in the way, and those who want to heal, help and make art will find exciting new ways to do so.
TARGETED I meant. Grrrr spell check