“All of our exalted technological progress, civilization for that matter, is comparable to an ax in the hand of a pathological criminal”
– Albert Einstein, 1917
21 July 2022 – Over the past few years I’ve had the opportunity to re-read numerous books and long-form essays that question mankind’s relation to technology and “the machine” – best friend or worst enemy, saving grace or engine of doom? Such questions have been with us since James Watt’s introduction of the first efficient steam engine in the same year that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. My primary authors have been Charles Arthur, Ugo Bardi, Wendy Chun, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Lapham, Donella Meadows, Maël Renouard, Eric Satin, Matt Stoller, and Simon Winchester.
As I have noted in previous posts, this Big Tech, Information Society we think is so new is not so much the result of any recent social change (information has always been key to every society) but due to the increases begun more than a century ago in the speed of material processing. Microprocessor and computer technologies, contrary to currently fashionable opinion, are not new forces only recently unleashed upon an unprepared society, but merely the latest installments in continuing development. It is the material effect of computational power that has put us in a tizzy. So although these changes may not have been due to recent social change they have actually launched immense social change. Exhibit #1: the Uber Files.
Uber’s former head of lobbying for key regions Mark MacGann recently leaked 120,000 internal documents dating from 2013 to 2017. These documents reveal the practices used by what was then still a start-up looking to put pressure on political leaders around the world. These documents shine a light on a skillful, elaborate and aggressive strategy designed to present its model as being so economically promising that it would be a historical mistake or a clear lack of vision to curb its ongoing development – at a time of public anger from taxi drivers, the primary victims.
The ridesharing company inaugurated this new model in 2009, becoming one of the main symbols of a new type of economy based on data and platforms. Thanks to the rise of smartphones, their integrated GPS localization technologies and advances in artificial intelligence, it has become possible to interpret people’s behavior and exploit it based on their phone usage, making it possible to suggest a potentially infinite range of hyper-personalized products or services. Everything seemed to be “Ubered”. We seemed to need *Uber like services* in everything. But that is the same for many incarnations in other digital segments we need.
The internet’s initial philosophy
This technological framework led to the birth of the concept of a supposedly “direct” connection between service providers and consumers. Another example is Airbnb, launched in 2008, which allowed hosts to set up agreements with occasional tenants. The point of this configuration was to fully incarnate the internet’s initial philosophy: based on a non-hierarchical structure, it would help to stimulate, with almost zero barriers to entry, an entrepreneurial spirit, or encourage a large number of people – including the most disadvantaged – to take on new professions without long periods of prior training. As for users, they were suddenly able to benefit from additional comfort.
But for lobbying practices to be fully effective, it is not enough to be supported by substantial financial resources and skilled opinion makers. There is another crucial component: a favorable context. This context was more than ever instrumental in the triumph of a dogma that said at the time that this new industrial era would bring in enormous wealth and help create jobs and new styles of management – “cool and horizontal” ones, which were everywhere in start-up culture.
These elements facilitated the creation of a kind of “socialist capitalism” from which everyone who wanted to could benefit while discovering new forms of personal fulfillment. This explains the enthusiasm shown across the political spectrum for entrepreneurial spirit and an eagerness to support it ardently.
What these leaks reveal is not so much the will to deliberately facilitate as to maintain a laissez-faire attitude by implying, with the help of economists zealously endorsing this dogma – sometimes in exchange for substantial compensation – that this process is so inescapable that trying to hamper it would be pointless.
This axiom led to a new conflict between the old and the new. Proponents of the former did not want to sweep away existing structures; proponents of the latter possessed the gift of being able to see the future. In other words, an equation whose very terms implicitly advocated in favor of these so-called visionaries, allowing them to cast a mocking glance at those old-fashioned, unenlightened people – so much so that people would joke that they were bordering on an “Amish” way of life.
Sacrosanct primacy of growth … and the increasing automation of human affairs
The biggest priority of all had to be given to the sacrosanct importance of growth, with no regard for its consequences. Ten years after the meteoric rise of the data and platform economy, it is clear that a great deal of damage has been done as a result of the cardinal doctrine of disruption. At the time, it was understood to mean the emphatic denial of all knowledge in favor of the glorification of so-called “disruptive” innovation.
To put it another way, the cruel conclusion is that a specific type of technical development has systematically been synonymous with social regression. What developed is pretty easy to understand: sophisticated tax evasion techniques and a workforce forced to submit to the uncertain lifestyle of self-employment, subject to permanent pressure and humiliated by user ratings.
And we saw it in such things as the emergence of a new kind of wage class in logistics warehouses, where workers are equipped with headsets or digital tablets telling them at all times the right movements to perform via artificial intelligence systems that force them into a hellish pace of work, reducing them to robots made of flesh and blood.
Beyond these social consequences, a new civilizational model is being established at great speed, one based on the increasing automation of human affairs. Uber is even considering eventually replacing drivers with autonomous vehicles and Amazon delivery persons with drones.
In this ideology, which aims for absolute efficiency in all things, humans are considered either fundamentally inadequate or ultimately redundant. In production processes, a human worker is seen as a cog in the machine – an unreliable one – and as a result, is destined to be first driven by algorithms and then to disappear.
In everyday life, technology now provides the tools to think of us as individuals whose behavior must be continuously analyzed and guided, either for commercial purposes or for the extreme optimization of society’s functioning.
From a data economy to a remote economy, and a switch from the political to the techno-economic sphere
Lawmakers in the U.S. and across Europe have allowed themself to be unobservant and will probably only be more so in the future, so it would be disingenuous to consider regulation a cure-all. It is not only processes that are at work but, above all, an ethos fixed on the ongoing automation of human affairs.
One of the characteristics of an ethos is that it cannot be regulated, only framed differently, which, in the end, would not alter its prevalence nor its deep-rooted nature. Despite greater awareness, it seems that history is hesitating. Since the lockdowns linked to the Covid-19 pandemic, we have indeed been moving from a data and platforms economy to a “remote” economy.
With this in mind, Mark Zuckerberg announced in October 2021 Facebook’s name change to Meta. Its goal is to build an informational environment that would give, using so-called “virtual reality” helmets, the feeling of immersion in a pixel-made reality: the metaverse. Oh, The Zuck is facing some major headwinds in that endeavor and the metaverse is fragmenting, as many pundits predicted it would. For a very good, unbiased overview of the metaverse – the Good, the Bad, the Ugly – I highly recommend Michael Ball’s new book The Metaverse.
It is our relationship with reality, with others and with ourselves that is going to change, because of systems that trace our every move and direct them for the sole purpose of profit or the hyper-rationalization of our actions. This galaxy of integral simulation risks imposing itself on us soon without any public debate, despite the significant consequences for civilization. A few thousand people are trying to manage the course of our individual and collective lives for the sole purpose of private interests and a strictly utilitarian vision of the world.
You are not going to change these deviations, nor change their influence on the course of events. It is far too late for that. But you ought to least understand why your communal modes of existence and organization are now based on such a different set of principles and values. Yes, probably one of the major moral and political imperatives of our time. But, hey – c’est la vie.