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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.
Thanks, interesting character, this Kriss.
I disagree with you both; it looks you are pulled in opposite directions by biases on the level of temperament. For you, tech feels like a natural and comfortable environment; for him it's noise, distraction, cognitive pollution. I'll take your word on him being tech-illiterate to boot, but as other responses show, that's not a necessary prerequisite for such an attitude at all.
He's probably very wrong on the future of internet. Cycles exist on different scales, and there's no law dictating that booms and busts happen synchronously, amounting to constant total engagement. It may be that there's systemic exhaustion with our current modes of online interaction; this will only make the next boom phase, prompted by some technological shift (near-inevitably it'll be AI-related) more insane. Maybe it'll even be about Zuck's Metaverse, or some less boomerish innovation.
He's very right about ephemeral online activity having very real opportunity costs. Most online happenings are nothingburgers, and they detract from purposeful socialization which disproportionately happens in person or, at least, though legacy, meatspace-centric networks such as one's professional community or political organizations.
But that's just another tax on akrasia and having low standards.
Regarding the loss of agency – you understate this. It's not a minor thing; we are getting scammed out of agency. With fancy UIs and castrated gadgets prompting zoomers towards software illiteracy, corporate mainframes encouraging one to outsource increasingly high-level cognitive operations and surreptitiously becoming adversarial, blessings of scale and specialization patching holes on one side, legitimizing de facto exploits on the other and disempowering even an above-average tinkerer, the Wild West Web has definitely come to an end. A month ago, @FCfromSSC has spoken on Gibson's Neuromancer and... I bet there was some more developed post, damnit. Anyway, what I want to say (and what was in that hypothetical post) is that Cyberpunk was not dystopian at all. It was full of hope, hope for the sovereign individual cutting through the mayhem and inept anarcho-tyranny of the near future, armed with nothing more than his trusty terminal, hacker mindset, high IQ and massive cajones. A solo console cowboy who can have a multi-year career running circles around major players of his economy (albeit knee-deep in the muck of the underworld, living on the edge of ruin and poverty) is a blindingly heroic image today, when Hackernews regulars are all employed by big tech, cultivate their CVs and race to affirm woke rhetoric of their HR betters, just like any other disposable blue collar serf – despite their ludicrous compensation packages and apparent prestige. They have no power within the system and no power without it, plenty of enthusiasm for geeky cooperation and no capacity for guild-building and lobbyism.
They sneer at artists who are getting impoverished by their tech – and fair enough, artists' Gnostic condescension of the higher spiritual caste has been insufferable and unmerited, a case of obvious but still obnoxious ressantiment. That said... artists are at least fighting for their turf. Do developers truly believe that helpful low-level tools like Copilot are where it stops, or are they just broken serfs? In my impression, these first-generation AI assists are akin to DeepDream in image generation. Maybe DALL-E 1. This means we're at most 7 years away from Imagen-for-code, and then the bulk of those folks go the way of middling coom accounts seething about Stable Diffusion right now. How much of their already gimped agency will remain in the world where they're as employable as artists or journalists? Will they still be meaningfully superior to boomers for whom even email is magic? Does it matter how well you understand email if nobody will ever write you and you can't host it yourself?
Tech is but a force multiplier. Political force is as easy to multiply as any other kind of force, and techies have not seized it while building the multiplier. Maybe we had missed the less centralized Cyberpunk option. Maybe the growth of tech couldn't have produced a meaningfully different world. It's like imperial centralization: I can dream of a beautiful Russian Empire ran by some constitutional meritocratic patrician monarchy... thing, leveraging vestiges of autocracy for common good projects spanning generations; commies can imagine much the same for their Politburo; Wolf Tivy can write about State Capacity Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics – but in practice we get what we get, probably what we deserve – lying, corruption, cynicism, idiocy, weakness, ruin, and NAFO types mocking the predictable result. Maybe those two domains are completely dissimilar.
Tech Pessimists have a point, regardless.
On a brighter side: Google has just thrown us a bone in the form of what looks to me like a very good open-source LLM. Thanks.
Thanks for sharing your pov.
I see this too, but I think I also see the mounting cultural counter-reaction to this. When I think back to the late 00's and early '10s, when the Internet was becoming really simple to use (compared to the late 90's/early 00's) and was getting flooded with SaaS apps and the iphone came out and all that, I saw non-tech people around me consume it all as if it were magic. There was joy, as if the possibilities of checking timetables on to go was just a step away from living in the sci-fi future of AI. There was also a lot of naivette, much to the frustration of all the crusty web users. I think the epitome was the Arab Spring also called (if I remember correctly), the Twitter Revolution--people really thought Twitter would usher in a new era of democracy in the middle east!
But today, the growing backlash against big tech has a very personal flavor to it. People around me are ditching their Alexa's and Siris and pushing their kids to have more fun the park. Not all people do it, since software has seeped so deep into our lives, but I guess I sense a broad sense of distrust that translate to people still using apps and online services, but at least, perhaps, trying to use them less often. Or maybe giving meatspace experiences more chances.
In a gist, I think our culture is developing an immune response to the attention-stealing gadgets we've been producing for the past 10-15 years. If my view is correct, where "correct" exists on a spectrum, we should start seeing these cultural artifacts bubble up into explicit things like regulations (eg. age limits on social media use) or customs (parents getting good at parental controls on tech) in the next 5-10 years.
I will admit that I'm completely blind to what people between 10 and 25 are doing with tech. I don't know anyone in this range. Some signals I'm getting are worrying, some are astonishing in a positive sense.
This is an interesting point. But I think you're contrasting two very different things. Hackernews, despite the name, has little to do with actual hacking. And, being a regular lurker for 10 years now, it feels to me that the spirit of hackernews has turned decidedly away from its start-up'y roots and toward boring everyday tech news. Sure, there are still stories about startups and sometimes interesting announcements (like Nystrom's "Crafting Interpreters"), but more often it's a piece about a new nuclear reactor or something for a bored, 25-45 yo techie to read on their break. Maybe we've all gotten older, started families, and aren't just interested in stories of pizza eating and late night coding.
But, what I'm getting at, is that there is still very much a wild, interesting coding scene. Absent from this scene are these highly paid Google and similar employees because, well, they're the people who opted to go corporate, to get regular, comfy pay for jumping through very tight hoops. I've dipped into this scene a few times, and every time I was astounded by how smart these people are... but also how well-socialized. I would describe their vibe as people who still think they're in school, aiming to get high scores, play within the rules, collect all the medals, etc.
Maybe the reason why we see fewer console cowboys these days is because the whole group of coders has grown, mainly filled by people drawn by the good pay & benefits. Because of this, the people producing wild and cool work are that much harder to make out in the crowd, their signal getting lost in the noise.
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