Image source: Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin.
My fascination with technology of all kinds can be traced back to my earliest memories. I wanted to know all I could about any object that might be applied to doing or making something, and about any action with a tool that can make something happen. In a fundamental sense, it was all about the acting on something in the world. What could be more fun than using something to make something happen or to create a new thing?
In the Boy Scouts, technology and technique ranged from using my pocket knife or pounding a tent stake into the ground, to tying knots, or from using an axe to split logs for firewood, to paddling canoes and later sailing sailboats. Soon, airplanes, cars, and boats became objects of affection as well as fascination. I wanted to drive, sail, or fly any machine that offered the capability to move, preferably fast… and eventually I did. I happily spent all the time I could maneuvering airplanes, helicopters, sailplanes, and sailboats, as well as cars. I wanted to go fast and not break anything—unlike “the Zuck.”
When my pocket knife folded over and cut a deep five-stitch wound in my right index finger during a Boy Scout carving contest, however, I experienced the my first cautionary tale of the dangers inherent in all technology. I did win second prize with my bloody basswood spoon. However, ever since that experience, I have understood that for any technology you can name, I can describe both edges of the two-edged sword that every ‘devise’ is. Whatever its intended purpose, any technique, whether applying a skill or using a tool, can be dangerous—that is, if used ineffectively, or even effectively for another purpose, the result of which is destructive more often than not.
After all, every technology is an extension of our power over ourselves, others, or some other part of the world around us. Without the intelligent exercise of the cautionary principle and deep understanding of the technique or device itself, and the object to which it is applied, somebody is bound to get hurt.
Back before personal computers, when pocket calculators were all the rage and getting quite sophisticated, my reply to my son, who asked for one of the many-function calculators, was that he could have any calculator at all, as long as he knew how to do the calculations by hand. Then, he would know the meaning of what the calculator was actually doing when he used it.
Later, when I was teaching a statistics lab, I initially told the students to perform whatever function they could using the statistics software on the computer. They came up with all sorts of “results” most of which were meaningless because while they could make the computer process data, they had no idea what they were doing. Some later learned how to actually use computing power to calculate statistical functions with a meaningful result.
Toxic Technology Today
Nuclear technology; autonomous armaments; chemical engineering; solar geoengineering, carbon capture and storage; social media; artificial intelligence; off-label prescriptions for pharmaceuticals, etc., etc.: each has a purpose and each can produce disastrous results, even if used accurately on the wrong object or target, or with the wrong purpose in mind—as when AI driven automatic targeting precisely blew up a girl’s school in Iran, killing hundreds of children and adults, simply due to the failure to assert human oversight. No thank you Palantir Technologies, Anthropic’s “Claud” was too stupid to recognize that the intelligence data was out of date! Any human analyst could have saved hundreds of lives.
Nevertheless, most of us view ‘technological progress’ as inevitable and good, and that it just has to be properly managed for it to be a benefit to society. However, we are beginning to see a lot more chinks in that cultural armor than in the past.
How technology is developed and used is determined by who develops and uses it, and who makes decisions about boundaries for its use. In the present day situation, the control of new technology is extremely concentrated in the very top of society’s economic infrastructure, where tech-bro billionaires rule a huge sector. The boys of Silicone Valley—mostly young white men whose culture is derived from online gaming, who have abstract technical skills along with certain anti-woman attitudes and far too much ‘screen time’—are as often as not narcissistic and even somewhat sociopathic.
Some, who have become multi-billionaires, think they should rule the world. A corollary to “you are what you eat,” is “you are what you do.” And these scions of the Tech world have spent their lives exercising power within highly competitive abstract systems of ego-focused warfare, such as “Call of Duty: Warzone” or “Counter-Strike 2,” which focus on fantasies of “first-person shooters” with a competitive dedicated male demographic. There is no clear line between their personal world of imaginary lethal power and their work orchestrating social media or artificial intelligence systems that ultimately seek control over millions of people. Empathy and concern for human wellbeing have no place in their mentality.
It is well known that narcissists tend to filter up to the top of hierarchies more than do ‘ordinary’ people, since they tend to more ruthlessly seek power and lack empathy for others. Too many of the “tech-bro’s” also harbor outsized imaginaries regarding their own power and their assumed importance of their work for society—they imagine that all technological development is good and that they should control it. The epitome of tech-bro delusion about human progress as reflected in their abstracted personal power over systems, including monetary systems, is expressed in the book, The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil, a principle AI researcher and inventor at Google. Intellectual genius does not equal wisdom. What is missing? The essence of humanity, our relations with one another.
In their fear of death and their delusions about digital technology as the ultimate destiny of humanity, these guys imagine themselves as somehow achieving endless life by ‘uploading’ their minds into the advanced software and hardware that increasingly drives the technosphere; yet they realize that they are vulnerable to the emerging very likely systemic collapse, which they vaguely refer to as “the event.”
In his book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, Douglas Rushkoff, Professor of media theory and digital economics at City University of New York, describes the twisted notions of security and survival that some of the most powerful businessmen in the world have faith in. A group of tech billionaires had hired Rushoff to consult and advise them on how they could secure their privilege and wealth in fortress-mansions as the world they created collapses all around them.
In that, they are no more sophisticated than the standard ‘preppers’ who imagine themselves living “off the grid” yet are far more dependent on “the system” for fuel for their SUVs and other components of industrial civilization than they realize. Actually living on the land requires that one know deeply the nature of the ecosystem in which one lives. That is one of the biggest hurdles that needs to be overcome in order to successfully construct an ecological community. Landed or indigenous living is all about community, not the failed imaginaries of industrial individualism.
Modern industrial technology, from extraction, manufacturing, and distribution to consumption and waste, is riddled with material and ecological toxicity. But rarely discussed is the cultural toxicity of the technosphere itself, or its implications for human wellbeing. Living in ecological communities requires abandoning all the toxic culture and technologies of industrial civilization in favor of actions, tools, and products that work in harmony with the local/regional ecosystem in which we exist.
The Politics of Technological Madness
Technology is inherently a means to power: the power to do something, to control some process external to the technologist, to control things, persons, and environments. It takes power to build something, and often a lot of labor, which takes time. But when technical power is turned to destruction, it can create much more entropy in a lot less time than it took to build what it destroys.
It may take months or years to build a school, but the same school can be destroyed in seconds by a ballistic missile or digitally directed drone. It has taken decades to build the U.S. national capacity to respond to epidemics, and even pandemics, with vaccines and public health practices. But it took “DOGE,” led by a mad billionaire, just a few months of indiscriminate firings and program cancellations to destroy that capacity and much more. The same is true for all the other federal agencies and programs demolished.
A primary component of the fascist ideology is destruction of anything that does not enhance to power of the fascist movement or regime. Fascist bad boys scoff at the idea of democracy. Their fantasy of redemption for the hollowness of their lives asserts a militaristic culture of extreme hierarchy at the top of which they must reside. However, their imaginary world has collapsed every time it was tried throughout history, after inflicting great suffering on the people they think they should rule.
The Future is Almost Here.
Toxic Technology is obviously unsustainable, both materially and culturally. It is fundamentally entropic. The future of AI is not that it will take over our jobs. Instead, the question of its future is whether it will bring down local/regional water and electrical utility systems before its patterns of energy and water consumption is constrained by the communities it plunders for scarce resources.
Each human-created technology tends to be more complex and powerful than the last. At the same time, the power and complexity both render it more dangerous, and increase the vulnerability of the society that supports it. In the era of industrial modernity, we have reached the planetary limit of technological growth in power and complexity. The only viable path forward for humans requires a total transformation of the technological trajectory. If the wellbeing of human communities is the active priority, instead of the proliferation of AI-controlled systems of dominance and surveillance by a corporate state, then the future will offer diverse evolving opportunities to shape the ecological civilization we need. That is the only option I know of that is sustainable beyond present business cycles. In an ecological civilization, technology must be widely distributed and grounded in low-energy innovation and application of tools we can use to assure human wellbeing, not system domination of human life.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 