My guess is that this article may get flagged, but it encapsulates very much my feelings as a younger Gen X.
In the 90s, while I didn't believe tech would bring about a "utopia", I did believe tech would be a very positive, powerful force in human society. The Internet was supposed to "bring us all together" when it made it easy for us to communicate without boundaries. It would cause the fall of authoritarian regimes as societies had freer access to knowledge.
In a major sense, though, the exact opposite has happened. Social media has torn us apart. Authoritarian regimes have discovered how they can control their people with rage bait and blind patriotism. And most importantly, from a personal perspective, I so often see tech not about improving the human condition, but how we can better addict people through dopamine scrolling, or insert yourself as a middleman in "winner take all" economics. In short, I've become intensely disillusioned about the positive power of tech, and that's a tough pill to swallow after dedicating the majority of my career to tech (and, transparently, I see the role I played as often part of the problem). I'm just very sad with how it all turned out.
Our actions certainly are, and if we think we have free will, we ought to be able to control those. And I think it is possible for us to do so.
But on the other hand, this isn't about me trying to persuade you, or you trying to persuade me. This is about a corporation (pick one) with a revenue base that matches many countries, spending a good chunk of that revenue on the best persuasive techniques and technologies the human race can produce, microtargeting each one of us to click the link, and draw from our eyeballs seconds of our time. The cost to us is small, that the side-effect is warping our perceptions of the world is something the corporation doesn't care about.
We're living in that shadow of H.P. Lovecraft's Great Old Ones - vast, inhuman things that reshape us and our world without any care or understanding.
I'm not genX but I felt the same. Even as late as the late 00s there was still widespread optimism about what the internet would bring. By the late 10s that feeling was completely gone.
I don’t fully disagree with what you say. I think social media also has some positives. The amount of transparency over government and exchange of knowledge and ability to learn is greater now than ever before. Hopefully we will swing back to a balanced lifestyle where phones and social media are just tools that people use in a limited way instead of being addicted to it.
My bigger fear of tech is how it’ll marginalize people economically and centralize power. We see it already with companies like Amazon. But the coming wave of automation over everything - manufacturing, entertainment, etc - may be far more damaging than even social media. Unfortunately right now it seems our political and economic systems are completely inadequate in preparing for this.
Mainly that people have a place to share things that are happening, spread them, etc. There is just far greater awareness. For example locally there are people who attend council meetings or other such events and report on things that the newspaper doesn’t. I don’t mean that the government itself is more transparent voluntarily - although I guess they do share some basic things like public notices via social media channels.
None of this has anything to do with technology itself, though. All tools used by humans will be put to the purposes that those humans bear.
The positive power we were attributing to the technology itself back in the '90s was really just the expression of the intentions and worldviews of the people who were using it back then, which was a self-selected and decisively non-representative sample of humanity.
After a couple of decades of tech usage expanding more and more broadly, we've seen a regression to the mean that puts Eternal September to shame, and we've discovered that the mean really is quite mean.
A lot of people disillusioned by this are unfortunately not disillusioned enough, and instead of taking things to their logical conclusion (that utopianism applied to the world at large is not just unattainable, but destructive, and improvement only comes from fostering a great plurality of local contexts so that at least some of them can diverge positively from the global mean) they want to transfer their utopian aspirations to some other global project.
Unfortunately, that other project is often politics, and if you think that failed utopianism in the tech world has had a bad result, just wait until you see the level of havoc that failed utopianism in the political sphere can wreak! Well, we don't have to wait for it -- the past hundred years of history provide copious evidence.
This is my sentiment too. It feels like the world is entering a dark period like it has many times before in history. I don't consider tech to be the cause, but it does seem to accelerate and amplify things.
> My guess is that this article may get flagged, but it encapsulates very much my feelings as a younger Gen X.
Ok so I'm curious about this.
In the broad strokes, did you think tech would be a major facilitator to things like unionization drives, campaigns to fight for and protect civil liberties, everyday citizens organizing together to gain a greater representation in their local government, etc.?
Or, again in the broad strokes, did you think tech would largely replace the need for these kinds of activities?
In the 90s, while I didn't believe tech would bring about a "utopia", I did believe tech would be a very positive, powerful force in human society. The Internet was supposed to "bring us all together" when it made it easy for us to communicate without boundaries. It would cause the fall of authoritarian regimes as societies had freer access to knowledge.
In a major sense, though, the exact opposite has happened. Social media has torn us apart. Authoritarian regimes have discovered how they can control their people with rage bait and blind patriotism. And most importantly, from a personal perspective, I so often see tech not about improving the human condition, but how we can better addict people through dopamine scrolling, or insert yourself as a middleman in "winner take all" economics. In short, I've become intensely disillusioned about the positive power of tech, and that's a tough pill to swallow after dedicating the majority of my career to tech (and, transparently, I see the role I played as often part of the problem). I'm just very sad with how it all turned out.