Our Digital Disillusionment and Hope
We may be disillusioned with digital technologies for now. But we've been here before and the future is brighter than we think.
I think it is fair to say that society is becoming increasingly disillusioned with our digital lives. The promise of the internet, open and free has become expensive and devolved into digital feudalistic states. Social media threw us all in a room and someone started a fight. The techno gods took a page from the food industry and figured out how to get us addicted with dopamine. The algorithmic bloodhounds hunt for the manna that will addle our brains.
We are the product and we are the serf. While this may all seem dystopian and doomed, that’s not where we are, nor where we are going. In fact, we may well, like we have many times before throughout history, end up figuring it out. We’re rather clever at that.
We’ve been disillusioned with technology before, going back hundreds of years. In some ways, it may be a normal sociocultural reaction. Then we figure it out in a more pragmatic way.
This is not an article to bring us down, but rather, one that shows there is hope. How exactly it will play out is a guessing game and subject matter for storytellers and Netflix series.
We have in large part, become disillusioned with technologies because few of the promises made in the 20th century, have been delivered. There’s no automated cars, the robots aren’t peeling our grapes for us, flying cars are for YouTube Shorts, information technologies didn’t give us the paperless office, instead giving us decades long productivity paralysis.
The pundits of the AI world have proclaimed that this will soon be solved with AI. Perhaps. The reality is it will take a decade or more for the evidence to show us.
We were sold on a new, happier, equitable society. Hollywood gave us the Terminator, but it also gave us Back to the Future. We were sold more utopia than dystopia. Even superhero movies have left us bereft of the promised future as Marvel movies fizzle.
Instead of a fairer economy, we were handed Surveillance Capitalism in the palm of our hand with candy coloured apps. Sweet dopamine. We came to believe the myth that if I’m not doing wrong, my privacy is safe. Now we have digital badgers zipping through fiberoptic channels, plying their data trade at every router. Ever frightful, the bureaucrat’s acquiesced to the rumbling tech giants who set their legions of lobbyists rippling through their systems.
The automakers, to compensate for not putting wings on cars, put bigger screens on the dashboard. It never before been harder to find a radio station or sometimes, even reverse.
The packaging was beautiful. The products inside were not as advertised.
And the digital deities of the A.I. industry wonder why people are less than enthusiastic of their brilliant inventions. To some degree Artificial Intelligence (AI) through Generative AI could not have hit at a worst time, or perhaps, the best time.
While we are not there yet, the people are restless. The peasants can no longer afford the cost of the dopamine being pumped into their eyeballs. They are eating digital cake but the taste is bitter and no longer sweet. Revolutions are quiet. Until they aren’t.
When Zuckerberg and his roomies created Facebook, they could not possibly have foreseen how their tools might be used. Nor could Jack Dorsey with Twitter. Then Snap. But slowly, they were seduced to the dark side of psychology. It is what Zuckerberg and his ilk became, not what they were.
It was how these leaders chose to wield these tools when they knew better. They argue free markets fix all problems. The evidence is to the contrary with digital technologies.
Then the enemies of democracy saw what the social media platforms were becoming, what they did to people. They finally engineered a perfect disease to infect their enemies people; mis/disinformation. It was administered in a dopamine rush called TikTok, then Temu which doesn’t sell products, it sells our data, and others. Humans tell stories to unite us. We also tell stories to divide us. This further soured the taste of the digital promise.
We may be in a period of digital disillusionment, but this too, shall pass. Henry Ford would marvel at the sumptuous luxury of cars today. The Wright Brothers would squeal with joy at todays international luxury air liners. Samuel Cunard would do cannonballs in the pools of today’s luxurious cruise ships.
Always, we have evolved technologies. And for the most part, for the better. Nuclear energy has never been safer. Blockchain is far from dead, it is just slowly improving in quiet ways. Software is a mess today, but far better than it was twenty years ago.
Maybe we won’t get masses of flying cars. Maybe autonomous cars will take another 50 years. We may never develop Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) with conscious machines, but that does not mean AI won’t do wonderful things for humanity.
As has always been the case with all technologies, the ultimate deciding factor is culture. that messy, complex and wonderful way humans have of deciding how technology will push societies forward.