(1) Instead of pursuing
truth, new technologies aim to replace it with mimicry and
fantasy
Not long ago, scientists wanted to understand reality. That was
true whether their names were Newton and Einstein,
or Hewlett and Packard - who established Silicon
Valley by building test and measurement equipment.
How quaint, test and measurement devices! - which humbly respect
the essence of the real world.
Could you imagine our leading tech CEOs
today wasting their time on measuring the world?
Instead they want to create their own
universe (or
multiverse or cyberspace,
to use the fashionable jargon) - and force the rest
of us to live in it.
So, in the last decade, the largest tech investments have gone
into creating fantasy and unreality.
Trillions are spent on
virtual reality and artificial intelligence (AI).
Tech has lost its reverence for the real, and
now hungers to displace it with its own Frankenstein
creations...
Never before in human history has the fake
been given such precedence over the authentic.
This has created an ontological crisis
in society, at a scale that previous opponents of everyday
reality (Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, etc.) could hardly
imagine...
(2) This has empowered
shamming, scamming & spamming at unprecedented levels
Have you noticed people complaining about
fake news or fake videos or fake images?
Or maybe you know somebody who got
catfished by a fake girlfriend or fake boyfriend?
Or perhaps you deal yourself with
phishing attempts, emails scams, bots spreading
disinformation, etc.?
Of course, you do. The phony stuff is
everywhere...
Sometimes I think that's how they named the iPhone - for all the
phony stuff it now delivers every day, every hour.
That's inevitable when innovation is focused almost entirely on
fantasy and fakery. The lies and scams aren't just side effects,
they are the main course.
This is precisely what the trillion dollars
of investment in the artificial and the virtual is supposed to
deliver.
So the widespread use of AI for classroom cheating
is exactly what we should expect. And the same is true of all
those fake news articles, fake music tracks, fake books, fake
images, fake videos - all pretending to be authentic human
creations.
When Big Tech makes fakery their highest priority, lies reach
epidemic proportions. We are now living with the consequences.
And if tech accelerationists get their way,
the deceptions will get much, much worse - and very rapidly...
(3) Users are not the real
customers - so billions of people must suffer to advance the
interests of a tiny group of stakeholders
We should have been suspicious when all the web platforms let us
use them for free.
As Robert Heinlein once warned, there is no such thing as
a free lunch.
Eventually you must pay...
That time has now arrived.
There was a honeymoon period during the early web years, when
users were treated as members of a community. But once
the digital platforms achieved quasi-monopoly status, those
friendly days were over.
These enormous businesses really do have customers, but they
aren't you and me.
Those real customers are mostly corporations
who pay either,
-
to influence us with ads,
-
or to gain access to private
information about us...
Anything else they do is just pretense and
window-dressing.
The system is designed to benefit a tiny
number of stakeholders, not the users - and certainly not
society or the culture.
This simply could not have happened in an
earlier day, when the economy was built on the sale of goods and
services to actual consumers.
Back then, businesses served the public -
they had no other option.
By destroying that fundamental relationship,
the door was opened to all sorts of abuses...
(4) Real people become
inputs in a profit-maximization scheme which requires that they
are constantly controlled and manipulated
Given all this, we shouldn't be surprised when the largest
companies in the world totally ignore what we want.
They make money by manipulating us and
spying on us - end of story.
If you aren't paying for the product, that
means you probably are the product...!
Here again, the abuses in the system are intentional - this is
not a flaw in the system, but actually how it has been designed.
And the situation will only get worse (unless
something else intervenes).
But what happens when billions of users are manipulated and
deceived to benefit corporate interests?
That's easy to answer:
Tech progress starts reversing,
as we now experience on a daily basis.
(5) In this environment,
everything gets viewed as a resource or input and the natural
world (including us) is ruthlessly exploited
Philosopher Martin Heidegger warned about this seventy
years ago.
In a prescient essay entitled
The Question Concerning Technology,
he discerned that,
the tech mindset views everything as a
resource to be exploited...
This is now becoming obvious to everybody.
At first, the natural world was
exploited, but now it's people too.
Everything gets turned into an input, and
is drained of all intrinsic or higher value.
Let me offer an example.
Consider a mountain.
What was once a sacred spot for
encountering the divine gradually gets turned into a
resource for manipulation and control.
Here's what that process looks like:
Chart describing
how different
eras perceive a mountain.
Now imagine what this same chart would look
like if you substitute people for the mountain...
Or you don't need to imagine - just consider your own evolving
relationship with the tech-driven world that surrounds you.
(6) The groundwork for this
was laid by theorists who replaced truth with power
It's tempting to ignore academics and intellectuals, or even
laugh at their bizarre theories.
But this time they actually accomplished
something - setting the foundation for our current crisis over a
period of 30-40 years.
Postmodernism started as a fringe academic movement, which
mocked notions of truth and value, showing how these terms were
typically just a smokescreen for brutal power relationships.
Over time, it became the dominant worldview
at our leading universities.
Hey, it was a useful analytical tool - and many of us (me
included) learned a lot from Foucault and other
postmodernists, as they showed,
how knowledge gets turned
into an authoritarian tool...
I thought that was valuable, because seeing
these abuses should make it easier to stop them.
But it didn't work out that way.
Something ugly happened instead...
Instead of criticizing and debunking these
abuses, a whole generation of smart people started imitating
them.
It was an easy game to learn:
You pretend to be truthful, but use this
to build your own empire.
And if there is no truth, why not use the concept of
truthfulness as just one more tool for your personal
advantage?
Academics were probably the first to figure
this out - playing deceptive power games with data.
But these techniques inevitably infiltrated
into the broader culture over the course of a generation. A
contempt for truth went mainstream - despite constant lip
service to honesty - and everything got justified (secretly) in
terms of power.
If you haven't noticed this, you're
either easily duped - or have been asleep for the last 20
years.
Technocrats inevitably got
corrupted by the destruction of truth for the purpose of power.
And it's hard to blame them:
the pursuit of truth has become a sad
joke throughout society...
And the CEOS of tech companies probably have
more to gain (financially) from lying than anybody
else...
(7) In the past,
governments controlled huge technologies (nuclear power,
spaceships, etc.) so they were somewhat accountable to citizens,
but now the most powerful new tech is in private hands, and the
public good is no longer even considered
Something else changed a few years ago.
Until recently, the big tech initiatives were controlled by
government.
Much of the information was classified,
and profits weren't the goal.
The space program was pursued almost entirely for
disinterested motives - not much different than climbing the
mountain in the chart above.
In other instances, research was done for weapons and
defense.
This was dangerous, but at least there
was some accountability - if only via elections.
And politicians felt a commitment to the
common good, at least on some level.
Most new tech came from these collective
initiatives.
Even the Internet was created by the US
Department of Defense...
Mark Zuckerberg
literally
can't be fired
(Wikimedia
Commons)
I'm suspicious of government, but I'm even more suspicious of
new tech that aims to serve a tiny number of private
individuals.
Believe it or not, it's actually easier to
change the President or political regime than replace
Mark Zuckerberg at Meta.
(I'm not exaggerating, he literally
cannot be fired by the Board,
or anyone else.)
Now every aspect of tech is like a Las Vegas casino - with a
small group of stakeholders rolling the dice and trying to hit a
jackpot.
You and I are just chips on the table...
(8) So much wealth is
concentrated in the hands of the winners in these processes,
that they literally become more powerful than nation states
Over time, this approach to monetizing tech turned the leading
technocrats into the wealthiest individuals in the history of
the world.
In many instances, these elites are more powerful than nation
states.
I now read news stories every week about a
tech CEO defying a head of state or court ruling or some
other government mandate.
And as they acquire more wealth and power, they become
increasingly detached from all aspects of the real world. Their
utterances get stranger and stranger.
That might be okay, except that,
they have the power to turn their
feverish dreams and fantasies into our realities.
Even
their craziest most
dysfunctional plans get
launched - just like one more billionaire's spaceship.
And the rest of us have to deal with the
fallout...
(9) With this shift in
power, even the most independent politicians turn into
controlled agents working for the technocracy - making a mockery
of democracy
When has the US government ever stopped any of them?
The short answer is:
Never...!
I can only conclude that these individuals
are now more powerful than the law.
It would be easy for legislators to require disclosures of fake
AI stuff.
But it never happens...!
The government could also stop corporate
surveillance, the sale of private information, manipulative
closed systems, malicious upgrades, forced tech linkages, and
all the rest.
But they don't...!
We could have honesty, transparency, and accountability
tomorrow. But nobody in DC even dares...!
It's not hard to figure out why.
It's expensive to run a political
campaign - and serious candidates need a coalition of
billionaires.
This makes a mockery of democracy,
because a tiny number of people have more influence than all
the rest of us combined.
So there are no checks and balances - only
checks, made payable to your current and future political
leaders, for services rendered.
If you don't think this is true, you are already living in one
those altered realities they're peddling in Silicon Valley...
A scene from The Godfather
(10) If you oppose this
command-and-control tech you can be theoretically (and often
literally) erased, suspended, deplatformed, shadow-banned,
surveilled, de-banked, digitally faked, etc. - so who will
dare...?
The system is self-reinforcing.
The
technocracy has created a world
in which we are forced to use their web platforms - just to do
our job and get through our daily chores.
So if we annoy them too much, they can
literally lock us out of our own life.
Take
a look at China to see how
extreme these controls can get.
We are still in a much earlier stage of
constraint and manipulation in most Western democracies.
But you can already find tech platforms
punishing their enemies, and this behavior increases each
year.
Do you think I'm exaggerating?
Just consider how much more manipulative and
controlling tech has gotten in the last decade - and then
extrapolate out another ten years.
The trend-line could hardly be more obvious, and there's no
reason to trust authorities to step in to fix matters.
They are more likely to facilitate and
participate...
