Something Scary is Happening

There are undoubtedly reams of scholarship about the topic I’m going to write about. I have read none of them, so these are the first tentative musings of somebody sniffing smoke well after the fire has already consumed the building. Here’s my premise: personal tech is doing more than changing the way we interact; it is also eroding our humanity in ways that appear, to me, to have profound implications for how we move forward as a nation and as a world.

And before you scream at me, “Michael, there are REAMS of scholarship about this topic!” I know. In fact, I just admitted as much in the above paragraph. But following the assassination of the United Healthcare executive and the puckish celebration of the assassin, the rise of the tech bro, the ascension of people like the Hawk Tuah girl and the predictable failure of her scam crypto coin, plus the elevation of Elon Musk as a kind of shadow president already coloring outside the lines of the incoming Trump administration, itself over-represented by the billionaire class, I’m left feeling like something fundamental may have shifted.

Something not, shall we say, good.

I don’t use the word “fundamental” lightly. I mean it to suggest that we’re potentially witnessing a usurpation of a Western value system that has been in place since the Enlightenment. That shift appears to be moving us away from democracy, with its emphasis on personal freedom and liberty, in favor of something resembling feudalism with a smiley face emoji.

This is us?

As I’m sure most of you already know (and for which I did a Google search just to make sure “feudalism” is the word I meant – it is), feudalism is a system in which an oligarchic class, supported by a monarch controls vast swaths of land. Vassals who live on those lands pay tribute to their lords in exchange for protection. Lords pay protection to their kings for the same.

What distinguishes feudalism from, say, autocracy, is that an autocracy places all power in the hands of a single individual. The citizenry is organized to obey and even worship that individual. Kim Jong Un, for example. Feudalism distributes power and the nation’s spoils among the nobility, which is headed by a monarch. The king is above the law; in fact distinguishing the king from the law is oxymoronic. As Louis XIV famously (and apocryphally) declared, “L’Etat, c’est moi.” Although I am obviously not an expert on, well, anything, this governmental - the model we appear to be racing towards - appears to align with Putin’s Russia or Orban’s Hungary.

While the Enlightenment obviously didn’t rid us of strongmen, it did put a new emphasis on the individual, on reason, and on the possibility that logic may serve us better than royal edict. From these ideas came modern democracies and their attendant problems. Those problems are compounded by a global system of interdependence and a growing reliance on technology to ameliorate our myriad issues, some of which spring from the technology meant to help us. Increasingly, it appears that technology is going to master us before we master it.

Too many of us now appear willing - even eager - to sacrifice humanism for technologism, a belief in the power of technology to improve our lives. While there may be a certain truth to that belief, what’s missing from it is a vision for a value system centered around machines, particularly when fewer and fewer numbers of people even understand the tech we are hoping will save us from ourselves. Those who do understand it - or at least own it - are the new nobility.

In the Middle Ages, vassals trusted that those who, literally, lorded over them were entrusted with these positions by the king who, himself, was granted his authority by God Almighty. The peasant class faced real problems: starvation, disease, military conquest. They put their faith in their “betters” to keep them fed and safe. A life of grinding, but ostensibly safe, poverty was their reward.

This is us?

Today, the problems feel no less acute: climate change, nuclear proliferation, war, novel pathogens and the means to make them go global. In addition to the persistent, and probably permanent issues of poverty, homelessness, and mental health woes. Instead of turning to God to ease our suffering, we turn, instead, to smart phones.

In both eras, people kept their faith with their gods. The serfs’ god, of course, was God and His emissary on Earth, the King of the realm. Our gods are, increasingly, technological and too many of us, I fear, are keeping faith with the that god’s emissaries on Earth, the technocratic high priests. In past eras, one could discern spiritual power from profane power. The Church kept souls in line. The Castle kept stomachs fed.

Now, though, Church and Castle are intermingled. Not only because of the devil’s pact between modern American white Christian evangelicalism and the Republican Party (this is, after all, a global problem), but because when we make gods of our technology, too many of us end up worshipping at the altars of its priests. Elon Musk is no saint. Nor are Marc Andreeson, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Marc Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, or any of the other mostly white, entirely (?) male cadre of technologists actively figuring out ways to addict us to their products and, through those products, take our money and shape our thoughts. In the incoming administration, many of them are being summoned to the king’s court and handed the keys to the castle.

That’s the political side of the problem, and it’s acute. What’s striking to me goes beyond that. As I said, I’m just kind of spitballing here, but it seems to me that when we invest so much of our attention on the billionaire class, the billionaire class’s mores and worldview tends to trickle down into the culture.

When we look at that group, what do we see? Primarily white, reactionary men who almost all appear to have some sort of neurodivergence issues. I don’t say that to be funny. I say it because this basket of character traits - rapacious, socially awkward, culturally illiterate beyond memes - has produced a tremendous amount of bad outcomes in the products they sell and, now, in the policies they are promoting. They’ve created a network of newspapers, social media sites and podcasts to amplify their voices and views, and one of them just spent a quarter of a billion dollars to get Donald Trump elected.

Why?

I believe that they believe they’re trying to make the world a better place, in the sense that they believe that technological solutions are the best solutions despite the fact that we’ve seen little evidence to suggest that most of what they do has meaningful value for anybody beyond themselves.

I’m not denigrating science or technology. Far from it. My concern, as I’ve said, is that the market movers of the particular technologies which have captured much of the public’s imagination, are, almost entirely bad people who routinely do bad things and then ask for the public’s adulation.

The problem with worshipping technology and those who create it is that technology is only as good (and here I mean “good” in the larger sense of the word) as the vision of its creators. I’m not saying the analogy is as simple as “bad people make bad products.” Not at all. Instead, I’m saying the monoculture emerging in the tech space is a dangerous witch’s brew of very smart people with very poor social skills attempting to reinvent government.

Worse, these same people are inspiring legions of fan boys who mimic their ethos. That ethos directly contradicts the fundamental value system under which we’ve been living since the Enlightenment. It replaces personal rights and freedoms applied broadly to personal rights and freedoms applied narrowly, and mostly to them. It’s an ethos that values the digital over the analog. It seeks to replace people with machines. It seeks to create ‘efficiencies,” to “reform” laws and regulations or, even better, to gut them. It is in currently in the process of creating a permanent overclass of technologists like themselves who will, as many have said, chop up the nation and sell it for parts. And they will do so while their fan boys cheer them on because privatizing the post office, for example, will trigger the libs.

This is us?

We are cheering on our own transformation from citizens to serfs and we’re doing it for the lulz. So why are we surprised when a kid inspired by the anti-technologist manifesto of the Unabomber takes it on himself to assassinate a CEO? Why are we surprised when he becomes a folk hero? Or when a stupid meme (“Hawk tuah”) leads directly to a crypto scam, or when the President of the United States is now issuing worthless cryptocurrency in his own name? Why are we surprised when the particular disorders and obsessions of Elon Musk trickle into the public consciousness through anti-trans legislation and through the transference of what was once the most powerful social media site in the world to edgelords and Nazis? Why are we surprised when we feel numb?

As I said at the outset, I’m sure there are reams of scholarship stitching this case together much better than I can. My concern is that the promise of trans-humanism has metastasized into a sinister techno-humanism which favors the tech side over the human side. My stance here isn’t anti-technological. It’s anti-technologist and the new quasi-governmental/religious project they are in the midst of creating. Governmental because they are exacerbating the transition of the United States into an oligarchy and religious because they’ve annointed themselves its saviors and seers. When you’ve got people like Vivek Ramaswamy passing around the tithing plate, my advice would be watch your wallet. And to find someplace else to be next Sunday.

I suspect I’ll have more to say about this half-baked idea in the weeks and months to come. As I said, I mostly don’t know what I’m talking about, but I do get the sense that all these little data points in the news are speaking to something new, and newly bad. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how you see the new web of government/religion/technology playing out over the next administration.