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Notes -
Techno-pessimism as Agency-Depletion
Note: This is an exploration of what techno-pessimism feels like. I don't think there's an argument I'm making here. Perhaps it's more a reflection on how deep my techno-optimism goes that it's so difficult for me to entertain the idea of techno-pessimism. The connection to the culture war is that techno-pessimism seems to be deeply embedded in the political dialogue of both the left and the right.
Francis Fukuyama, in his 1992 classic "The End of History", spends a few pages describing techno-pessimism. It's been a while, but I think he put it as a belief that technology doesn't solve man's problems and may, in fact, make them worse. The flavor we're experiencing now has its source in the meat grinder trenches of WW1 when people were confronted by a mechanized, assembly-line conflict that was optimized for turning real live humans into ground meat.
For a long time, I didn't give this idea much thought. It was a useful label for a cluster of ideas I'd come upon time and again; a useful bucket to put people in to better understand them, nothing. But today, I read a piece that triggered all my "angry uninformed person ranting on the Internet" alarms, and instead of closing the tab, I spent some precious work-time to read it.
At the end, I was blown away. Not by any new points or ideas, but by being, for the first time ever, shown what techno-pessimism looks like from the inside. Suddenly, these two words stopped being merely a label, but also a lens through which to view the world. And I'm still shocked by seeing something so completely alien to my own perception.
I write code for a living. I have a general idea of how computers work and how different types of software works: payments processing, flight controls, video games, social media, VR, point-of-sale systems, etc. I also licked a little bit of physics and information theory, so I kind of see how all the machinery around us operates, at least on vague level. In the world, I feel... comfortable. I can fix a change a door lock, fix a leaky faucet, install an outlet, change a car tire, etc. It's all just machines of different sorts.
I hope this doesn't sound like bragging. I'm no genius. I can't fix most things and I'm more than happy to hire an expert when I can. I don't understand how most things work. Just enough to get the big picture, the relationships, the constraints.
Reading this the above linked blog post showed me a world where I know non of this. A world where I have some vague ideas about simple things like a squeaky hinge and the like, but anything above it is black magic. I mean, computers have inserted them into every facet of our lives. They record, update, store, delete, connect, calculate everything about us: our bank accounts, our working hours, our taxes, our retirement funds. The distance to the store, how busy a coffee place is, how to send flowers to your mother on Mother's day. Even if you're relatively disconnected, over half the world's population is plugged in; over 3bn people have Facebook accounts. TikTok has 1bn users; so even if you're disconnected, the majority of the people around you are plugged in, dancing to the rhythms created by man and machine together.
That's a terrifying. I can't imagine the frustration this guy has to feel. He can't troubleshoot his router, apart from pushing a paperclip into the little hole to reset everything. He can't make his own website (that doesn't look like templated shit). He can't figure out the right steps to get the car computer to reboot correctly after the battery ran out of power. Jesus, the sheer alienation must be terrifying--you can't really affect your immediate environment in any meaningful way. You're at the mercy of these beeping, monitoring, distracting machines all around you.
Now I understand that, perhaps, WW1 was the moment when people realized they built a grand machine that they only pretend to control. A machine with tendrils leading into every house, every room, every other person. And while in the first half of the 20th century any clever farm boy was likely able to mess around with a car, this isn't true today. There's a lot of layers of abstraction. So many interconnected systems. (Though I believe that taking a beginners course in programming would dispell like 80% of ignorance about machines).
How much agency is lost because of the aggregate effects of modern technology? Sure, the world of yesteryear wasn't some primitive utopia. But even within the strict confines of tradition and feudalism people had agency in the little things. Now, people like the author of that blog post I read are left without even the little things--their "smart" coffee machine will calls the cops if he tries to insert off-brand coffee pods into it.
After reading the linked post, I find your associations strange. To me, it's not at all about understanding how routers work, it's all about the social aspects, trends, fashions, services, the gig economy, the fake ess of online interaction. None of this changes much if you understand TCP/IP.
The nerd likes tech for the sake of it, the enjoyment of the tinkering, the fiddling. To see the machine do a thing. Once it's figured out and it works, it's no longer interesting. Like the data hoarder who endlessly organizes and categorizes tens of terabytes of media but watches none of it, the nerd builds and mods things for the process itself, not for prolonged enjoyment of its use. And so this has little impact on whatever happens to the social significance of the internet.
Richard Stallman already said in the 80s that if users can't control their computing, the software makers will control the users. But general users have little interest or capability to control any computation.
So how are things changing? In my tech bubble I see a lot of anti-tech sentiment as it relates to modern tech companies' practices, the criticism of walled gardens, censorship, locked down devices etc. People who understand tech seem to want none of the smart home stuff, they keep their kids away from gadgets. The new status symbols are logging off and being physical, appreciating ancient literature etc. There's also a different type of tech person, the fan boy who is loyal to big tech brands, loves the prospect of the metaverse, fills his house with proprietary automation tech and lives his techiness via owning the latest iPhone at any given moment.
But nerds, tinkerers and tech enthusiasts don't matter so much in the big picture. The question is how the mass of consumers will react. Is there something in humanity which will reject the matrix and turn away from the algorithmic dopamine machine? Will people get exhausted or can the machine adapt and transform to keep people hooked?
I mean when have we ever seen large scale voluntary rejection of tech, except for deeply religious communities like the Amish or orthodox Jews? I don't really see a way around AI seeping into your coffee machine, your dishwasher, the fridge. Rejecting it might become a hobby for some upper class people, like having a fancy fireplace in your mansion just for the aesthetic. But for the gen pop...
People don't Münchhausen their way up to self-reliant rugged tough people without external pressure. There has to be a crisis big enough that it forces people.
On the other hand there's always some cyclicality to the generations. The sexual revolution, drugs, free love and tolerance led to metoo, low levels of risk taking and sex and drug consumption among young people, the wokescold moral police etc. But just as the original social rebels rejected conservative Christian moral authority, new generations may reject the DEI religion.
It cycles but stays the same. One can argue that the original matrix that made us prisoner slaves was agriculture and the settled life. That true life is living off the berries of the forest, fighting mammoths and facing the beasts of the night, and watching your children die, that that's what chisels a firm soul.
The heart flies high like this author's, but he, like many before, imagine some cataclysmic realization by humanity of their own need for true freedom and agency, but it never comes.
I think this is your central point. And I think the answer is yes, just like we tamed other unhealthy forces in our environment like alcohol or fast food. Meaning, my bet is that we'll develop social rituals, habits, taboos around software tech (social media first, probably) that will limit its unhealthy effects and eventually steer it toward something useful and acceptable. But we'll never be completely free of its side effects, just like we'll always lose people to alcohol or fast food.
I don't think high tech and self-reliant ruggedness are at odds. Instead of fighting mammoths and faces the creepy crawlies at night, we're fighting against surveillance, addiction, and control. It's a very real fight for survival, perhaps less physical and more about soul/agency. But it's strenuous, demanding both instant action and long-term strategic thinking.
Maybe, just maybe, this is actually the escape hatch from our all too comfortable physical lives--being forced to fight for your the life of your soul and agency, your very humanity, against a growing, sly, unthinking machine.
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