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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.
You underestimate the level of horror.
The average person doesn't just not know how things work... They know as a matter of objective fact that they're hostilely designed to take agency away from them.
It is not only a pain in the ass that all cars have computers, it is now illegal to make new ones that don't have computers, those computers ensure you can't do maintenance on your own car, the user agreement might make it literally illegal to do that maintenance via cracks and work arounds, and the government is passing new regualtions so that your car will have remote automatic shutoffs, and maintain tracking data, so that it will betray you if you ever try to run from the state, and bear witness against you at your trial.
That's just cars. Computer software for the past 20 years has only gotten worse for 90% of users, going from an objest you owned and could install, to a permanent relationship tying you into dependence on hostile corporate entities you are now a permanent funder of... if Adobe decides they don't want you to be able to create certain images, they can just update your copy of photoshop to make it automatically stop you... sound far fetched? Try photocopying a dollar bill. The machine will detect what you're doing and override you. That isn't even software as a service, that's hardware.
Then there is the near permanent surveillance enabled by all the apps you literally must have to not be shut out of the economy and rendered homeless, the constant assault on your attention and hostile design meant to distract you that you must constantly fight on social media, which you also can't opt out of because that's now how business, romance, communtity organizing and basic socializing is done and you'll die alone and abandoned if you don't give in and feed your personal data and waning atttention to it...
and then even if you accept that as the cost of doing business those systems supposedly objective results are manipulated by people who hate you
to politically disempower you and destroy the last bits of resistance you could possibly muster.
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Technology has not advanced in America... If we define technology as allowing people to get what they want: Improve their lifestyle, secure shelter, secure social relations, travel... Every aspect of American technology, from cars, to air travel, to office tech has only gotten worse since the 1980s.
Hell flying cars existed in the 1910s (teenagers could fly the Focker Dr3 and it would fit in a double wide garage), Nuclear batteries and freighters existed in the 60s, we had lighter than air freight service in the 20s.
By rights international trade should be dominated by 3000ft nuclear powered zepplins by now, and personal travel by cheap prop planes (you can not tell me just reproducing the Dr3 is more expensive than the modern nisan)
Theil made the case that American technology had advanced in the world of bits, but not atoms, because the world of atoms has been regulated to death...
I disagree America has advanced. Outside of surveilling the population, killing foreigners, and safety features no one would willing pay for and thus have to be regulated... America has only regressed. Housing is uglier, smaller, and more expensive anywhere anyone wants to live, cars are uglier and more expensive (no GM factory worker is getting a new one every 2 years)... even in the realm of health any gain to lifespan has been more than offset by obesity and chronic disease destroying the quality of youth. Hell lifespans have even stopped rising...
The one thing this society values, being safely infirm longer, and even that one metric is reversing.
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The age of "The Social Network" has seen an implosion of relationship formation! An implosion so catastrophic the greatest geopolitical factor is now population implosion.
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