The most interesting and noble work the human race could produce in the 21st century is a bit of introspection and idleness; the cessation -or at least a pause- of its own obsession with technological progress owing to its two most natural states, its Dasein: death avoidance and curiosity. This may be the only way to avoid further and full digital enslavement, de-humanization, and subsumption to trans-human tech-enabled totalitarianism in the name of “saving the planet,” and the human himself. More tech cannot save us. Less just may.
This talk, of course amounts to modern blasphemy –I’m aware– but this path, or simply slowing our pace down it, would represent our highest transcendence: denying our evolutionary vision of ‘all things as tool’ in order that we might keep our humanity a while longer. You might consider how readily you accepted that word, blasphemy. It implies transgression against a religious system of thought-an ideology. Easily acceptable, obvious, true. Technology is a religion. Even if you’re religious -especially if you are religious- think about your morning routine. Do you speak with your God or consult the glow of the oracle wraith of Steve Jobs first? Thought so.
Short of this noble effort, this reversing course (which I fully admit seems and feels impossible), we both feed and become the machine that eats our souls, at a speed in step with some amalgam of Price’s, Moore’s and Metcalfe’s laws, and run toward our own enslavement by our drive for the avoidance of privation-[turned-convenience] and our desire for a Ouroboric return to the unconscious pre-birth state of blissful unawareness (pre-fallenness in the garden, for the Christian mind) of death; oneness with the great mother.
And she is rising, Kali, as evidenced by the ironically, would-be-humorous-weren’t it-terrifying masculine drive of third wave feminism, the overt feminization of men and boys, and our obsession with sameness –equity– an unconscious drive toward nihilism, annihilation.
The tech is soul-devouring. The tech quantifies, infers, trains (feeds) on the data we give it. We are the training set. Our behaviors are measured, compared, stratified, normalized, then projected, fed back, re-interpreted, then recursively split tested, used to re-train, analyzed for sentiment, categorized, and ultimately used to sell us our own desires with dangerous efficacy and efficiency. That’s what a market does – it is what Kaczynski called an ‘Objective Factor’; a flywheel that once started, exists and behaves of its own accord; a factor we can’t control, and which does not obviously work toward our benefit or capitulate to our directions. Technology and markets are both examples of these. Your facial expressions are already mapped, and sold on a market to which you have zero access. You think ‘well I’d know if that were happening.’ They didn’t know we’d need to organize labor unions against the market forces of capitalism until they had already created a labor market–one quite hostile to life as an average person. Why would this be any different? Your clicks and hover intents are literally video recorded on most every serious SaaS application you’ve ever used, and have been for a long time. Do you have access to those recordings? Brilliant technology that is, seriously, it’s impressive. I use it. Look up Fullstory (Orwellian name, no?)
It’s much worse than that. Cambridge Analytica made their business on mapping aggregate user data to the scientifically rigorous Big Five personality system that measures degrees of temperament in key categories, subcategories, and facets of those subcategories. These are typically measured via multiple choice test but can be inferred from text as well, and most of the personality systems you’ve used at work or with your husband or wife (fuck you, I’m not saying partner.) to gain some insight into that half-crazed monkey’s skull with whom you’re trying your damndest to reason, are based on this underlying Big Five model. Quickly, the top level traits are most easily recalled through the acronym OCEAN: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The trick C.A. devised was to analyze text you’ve written, likely using what’s called a Bag of Words analysis (though they’re likely using much more sophisticated analysis, in addition; this category of computing is called Natural Language Processing or NLP for short) to understand the sentiment, tone, and general emotion of your words, then by mapping those sentiments to the content you commented on, thereby creating your political sentiment. Combine this with the rudiments of the Political Compass Test, and you’ve got a fingerprint of personality-meets-political preference, as well as a pretty clear picture of reactivity to particular messaging (topical sensitivity, voracity of response, etc). When combined with more simple ‘like’ data, they’ve got you dead enough to rights to use Nudge theory and not so slowly, but surely move you toward the more extreme outer poles of not just reinforced amorphous belief in a candidate, but, importantly, toward a disdain for another candidate and her political backers, her party. Ring any bells? They’re equal opportunity assholes and mappers of human emotion.
These explanations are absolutely rudimentary compared to the treasure trove of data and processing sophistication that big tech has on you. Data you wouldn’t even know to lobby for access to. Ask a copyright lawyer what happens with a collection of works derived from proprietary data; generally, the user can own his data, but the collection? That’s all theirs.
My point is that your data, though you haven’t thought of it as such just yet, is the counterpart to your DNA, your body. It’s your soul. The eyes, being the window to it, are a trillion dollar industry. Our pupils perhaps more valuable an ore to mine than oil. For oil is a poor predictor of when you’re aroused (literally) enough to fork over your soon to be Digital Dollar for a big purchase. If you wouldn’t send your genome to big tech (not that you haven’t already, with that aberration that is 23 and Me), then why give them your personality, your desires, your very intentions? How much more is it, you, your data, your derived soul, than is your heart rate your derived body?
And worse (I’m sorry, this doesn’t get rosier), if you consider Soros’ principle of Reflexivity; the risk-weighted influencing of markets instead of the simpler attempt to predict them which results in reversion to the mean, for financial gain, and how this might apply to ‘catching your trade’ (Reflexivity isn’t the same as high frequency trading. I don’t mean to imply it does) your expression, interpreting it, then feeding you back additional messages to nudge your perception in order to influence your next action (staying on a page, clicking ‘buy,’ etc.), you may begin to get the absolutely simplest version of the idea of where this leads. It’s nothing new. It’s always been an advertising game. It’s just that AI, facial recognition and cross-browser, cross-device, cross-IP fingerprinting becoming predictive and influential turns the adversarial advertising match in resistance to marketers’ messaging from David (you) vs Goliath into David vs Megatron. It’s fuck you, pay me behavior. It’s ransomware of the soul.
That’s a tiny fraction what’s coming as I see it. If I wrote the whole thing (and I may) it’d depress you, I promise.
Buy a farm, engage in the power process, burn your television, eat less, run like the wind, bathe in cold waters, beat your chest, and do it now in expression of your humanity. We either unplug the internet, or it crawls into our veins and, when we finally realize that we’ve sold ourselves into this slavery and try to leave the plantation, the plants themselves will curl around our ankles like chains, dragging us back to captivity to modernity, and under the moniker of health. But what is health already? Chemicals to relieve some other chemical’s gnarly effects? Pills for low dopamine owing to YouTube obsession and blue light sickness? Exogenous insulin for the one mandatory gram of sugar sneaked into every goddamned product on the planet (thanks Koch)? And the Bluetooth 5G insulin pump is the fucking solution? LEAVE IT BEHIND. Put your feet in the dirt. Gut a fish. Scrape your hands on the rocks. Bloody your knuckles on the plough. Hell, have a tribal war-you’re fighting a fake one via keyboard each day (or trying your best to resist) anyway-it’d be much more human and humane of you! Engagement is now a click measured by Google, not a long gaze into the majestic human eye; and that eye is being recreated too–for “progress.” What if blindness is a blessing to the blind?
You are your crypto billfold. You are your social credit score. You IDENTIFY as a consumer. You sucker. You buyer of tokens. You are waiting to die but unwilling to do so despite not living. “Your usage is up 20% this week” says your whole life that fits in a 3 x 5” entrancement device–as if that’ll even slow you down. The buttons you click order you to “Submit,” and you do.
If you’re free, why are you addicted? If you’re free, try quitting. If you’re free, then why MUST you play? Why MUST more automation take place? Efficiency. Economization. How long until you yourself are economized in the name of economization? “What would you say it is you do here?” is a line that AI-ified HR won’t even have to ask you; it’ll know. And you’ll be redundant. Or your children will be – does it really matter – it’s coming all the same – can you not feel it? The first UBI class will legitimately have more opportunity for human experience than you and I, but be too consumerized to take advantage; too controlled in movement, and ultimately perfectly uninterested in doing so; a true Docile Body as Foucault would call it; a state-weakened spirit surveilled into panoptical submission.
Technology has the spirit of the Left; progress. Progress at any and every cost necessary for dominance. A touch of heroine does hurt, and it’s worst feature is the ease with which it slips over our body like a warm blanket of one-click sign ins and UX optimized cookie policy acceptance buttons. Give her an inch and she’ll call you a racist, take a mile, then tax your moderately endowed bank account on behalf of a faux-benevolent system dead set on your Orwellian compliance-and she’ll take a false confession for re-broadcasting purposes just the same as an authentic one. Technology is transformative by nature – I use ‘nature’ and ‘her’ purposefully; they are feminine in this way: they are programmed and their dasein is that of evolutionary progress. This is not an insult, but take offense if you desire.
No. Technology has changed our very free will-a nasty trick, that; to dupe us with endless optionality, endless preference, endless quasi-reality. But it’s divided us, and means to conquer us. It’s not so obvious that technology doesn’t have a spirit. One, perhaps that has more will than humans, an indomitable hunger to “eat the world,” as the boys at A16Z would have it. I think we should bail on this one-party-fying force–secede into the dark forest for a time, let this blow over, let the fire breathing beast consume itself, and adhere once and for all -or for the remaining humanity anyway- to Dunbar’s iconic conclusion of small, cooperative kin groups. Read some Ted K. if your years can hear an anti-tech message (if its tendrils are not already wrapped lushly ‘round your lymphatic system) and let me know your thoughts. These are some of mine: Let us be satisfied. Let us retreat to earthiness. Let us destroy the chains we’ve built out of fascination for tools -yes, the very fascination that has led us to ease and modernity and poisonous decadence- and in so doing, save later humanity, generations from now (if our jealous attention spans can bear the thought) a larger piece of ground in which to wriggle their toes.