Tech Is Destroying the World

Remember Cassandra, she who predicted the future and was never believed?

You know you’re having a bad day when you come across Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski’s manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, and realize that you and Kaczynski agree on far more things than you ought to, given the fact that he killed three people, injured two dozen others, made 16 bombs, and detonated 3 of them successfully. If Kaczynski and I were a Venn diagram showing the logical relation between sets, our respective belief systems would substantially overlap, sans the unpleasant murder associations, of course. I throw bombs with my mind, not my hands.

But for a lonely, heartless, nasty old survivalist hillbilly with a Ph.D. in Mathematics, Kaczynski wasn’t completely wrong. In Industrial Society and Its Future, he asserted that technology had a destabilizing effect on society, made life bleak and meaningless, and caused widespread suffering. His solution? Returning to anarcho-primitivism, which is the complete abandonment of civilization.

Too late for that, I’m afraid. Horse/barn/out. The problem with the Kaczynskis/Zuckerbergs/Musks/Bankman-Frieds/Thiels of this world is that, lacking all empathy for others or indeed even a cursory understanding of human nature, their own or anyone else’s, they fail to take into account one salient fact: the vast majority of people would never prosper within a Mad-Max-like anarcho-primitivistic society. In fact, the utter lack of compassion that led Kaczynski to kill people is the same one that gulled him into believing a non-society could ever be a viable alternative to Wall Street, McDonald’s, and the mall.

To me, and apparently to eighty-year-old Kaczynski, the destruction caused by computer technology and AI (Artificial Intelligence) is a bloodcurdling scream heard by almost no one.

Maybe we’re too busy looking at our smartphones to notice. Each of us exists within our own information silo, oblivious to what’s happening right in front of us.

What technology in general and AI specifically have done is destroy everything that’s objectively real, and then erect a Potemkin Village instead, giving us an instant means of communication (smartphones) but less real communication; porn, but not intimacy; a no-benefits, no-health-insurance, no-pension gig economy in lieu of actual job security; deep fakes instead of objective truth; imaginary money (cryptocurrency) instead of fiat currency; and dozens of studies linking tech to anxiety, severe depression, attention deficit, isolation, suicide, FOMO, sleep disorders, obesity, bullying, loss of empathy, stunted imagination, and for those of us who actually care, a feeling of apocalyptic dread.

If we have learned anything at this point, we should at least question the rosy prognostications of Silicon Valley boy-kings like Mark Zuckerberg who promised to “connect the world,” and ended up enabling a blizzard of Covid disinformation that cost millions of lives; Sam Bankman-Fried who ran a cryptocurrency exchange called FTX and was just arrested in the Bahamas for mass embezzlement of his clients’ money; and the thousands of delusional tech evangelists who argue that we are on the brink of an AI-induced productivity explosion that will shower abundance on us all.

No, actually, it won’t.

All AI will do, and is doing, is concentrate enormous amounts of wealth among a handful of mostly white men. If we thought the excesses of the Gilded Age were bad, wait till we fully grasp the implications of the Age of Technology.

We’re already seeing the very real fallout of Zuckerberg’s utopian vision of connecting the world. His reckless pursuit of profit substantially contributed to the atrocities and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Myanmar military against the Rohingya people in 2017, leading to 116,000 Rohingya that were beaten and another 36,000 that were thrown into fires. Meta (aka Facebook) refused to “silence free speech” and turned a blind eye to the vicious lies its platform disseminated because, let’s face it, the Rohingya weren’t useful subjects for data mining.

And then came January 6, 2021. Zuckerberg, the Great and Powerful Oz, didn’t do much to stop that, did he? The whole insurrection was organized online, much of it on Facebook. Internal documents show that the platform wasn’t just caught flat-footed, it was nearly complicit. According to whistleblower Frances Haugen, “Facebook misled investors and the public about its role perpetuating misinformation and violent extremism relating to the 2020 election and January 6th insurrection.”

What else would you call that? You know, besides “complicit”?

Remember when the internet was actually cool? I do. For just a few halcyon years in the early aughts, we didn’t have algorithms, paywalls, data mining, Cambridge Analytica (the Evil Empire that illicitly performed the data mining), or the wholesale corporate coopting of “political correctness” (I like political correctness, just not used cynically and venally by corporations) as a means of selling products. People were doing things. Creative things. It was a time when the tech-utopians actually had a leg to stand on.

Then came the unholy merger—the crass, disgusting, unspeakable congress—of tech and Big Business. From that point forward, our privacy was auctioned off to the highest bidder, information wasn’t free anymore, and the worst and least qualified among us were calling the shots.

In the immortal words of Al Pacino’s John Milton (Lucifer) in 1997’s The Devil’s Advocate:

“You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire; you build egos the size of cathedrals; fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse; grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green, gold-plated fantasies, until every human becomes an aspiring emperor, becomes his own God... and where can you go from there?”

Chilling, isn’t it? The truth always is.

Millions of middle-class, upper-middle-class, service-sector and factory jobs have already been lost to AI, and Big Tech is just getting started. Think of their advantages to replacing humans with machines. No pesky sexual harassment or racial discrimination suits, no paid sick leave, health insurance or benefits, no severance packages, no whinging, no backstabbing, no shark-toothed wannabes jockeying for your position. If AI can do the job faster and better, why wouldn’t a corporation, whose sole legal mandate is to maximum profits, buy into it?

The C-Suite overlords don’t care. They’re out playing golf.

To see the future, one has only to behold the past.

Here are the ways in which technology has made our lives worse.

• Airbnb, the computer-based network connecting travelers with property owners, has made deserts out of once thriving metropolises. Things are so out of control, affected communities are passing legislation to restrict its use. Airbnb artificially inflates property values and encourages speculative “investment property” buying, which then prices locals out of the market. It overruns specific areas with unsustainable amounts of tourism. Complaints regarding litter, illegal parking, and noise disturbances are higher in communities with Airbnb-style rentals, and “hosts” across the board avoid paying taxes on their rental income, thereby robbing communities of millions in local revenue.

• Getting a job, which is supposed to be easier now, what with resume-posting/job-finding sites like LinkedIn and Upwork, is in fact a stark, terrifying, post-apocalyptic wasteland of spammy come-ons, memory holes, jobs-that-aren’t-jobs, and fraud. As a freelancer, I regularly scan the boards, and things are so bad right now, I may need to return to the U.S. for work. It’s worse for people who have a deep resume like mine. Why? Instead of competing with maybe 20-40 people for a job, as I did in times past, I’m competing with the whole world—a world that is willing to do the job for less.
  
  What a win for employers! And what a loss for the rest of us.
  

• Even porn is affected. No, I’m not shedding any tears, but porn actors are performing a service for which they should be fairly compensated. Not anymore. The internet hasn’t killed porn, of course; nothing could. But first piracy and then a glut of “amateur” (read: free) videos are just two of a host of reasons “porn stars” are a thing of the past. Fewer productions and a surfeit of talent means lower wages; most female porn actors make most of their money hooking on the side. Progress?
  

• Spotify and other streaming platforms have all but gutted the music business. Bands make a third of a cent—you read that right, a third—each time one of their songs is streamed. If that band is under contract with a music label, the money, such as it is, goes straight to the music label, most of whom are actual co-investors in Spotify. In real terms, for an unsigned band to make so much as one dollar requires 350 streams (plays). When a band is competing with 11 million other artists and creators, I’d put that band’s odds of making a living at diddly over squat. First, tech killed vinyl, then eight-tracks, and then CDs, effectively cutting artists out of the line of profit. Then tech invented the .99 online download. Now, even that is gone.
  

• Anyone who is a regular reader of Cappuccino knows how long I’ve been sounding the alarm about cryptocurrency. In a real-life instance of the emperor wearing no clothes, cryptocurrency, or “crypto,” as the cargo-shorts-wearing Sam Bankman-Friedenfreudes like to call it, is literally imaginary money. All money is a social contract—a point I make in this Cappuccino—but crypto elevated that social contract to full-on grift. How is this money? Tell me how we are supposed to trust an unregulated, unmanaged and unmanageable bunch of criminal lordlings to play by the rules?
  
  Yeah, it turns out they didn’t. Their Dark Lord, thirty-year-old villanaire, Sam Bankman-Fried, is in jail now, hopefully for the rest of his amphetamine-fueled, geek-orgy life.

• If platforms like Spotify weren’t enough to kill the arts, along came DALL-E and Midjourney to finish the job. Type in a few keywords, and voila! AI will create an image that requires no pesky apprenticeship, discipline, even a rudimentary understanding of art, creativity, or the long journey to personal excellence … just a few keystrokes. The ease of production alone squeezes real artists out of a job, but it does far more than that. It highjacks the entire creative process, which is purposely long, fraught, frustrating, and bloody, without regard for the fact that the struggle itself is what fuels the art. In creativity, the obstacles are the path.
  
  Not anymore.

• The social media experiment is an abject failure. When it was set loose on a world full of panicked monkeys (us) who deeper down are a lizard (also us), social media became a bomb on a timer.
  
  At least with the generation of fathers (Silents, Boomers), we knew what kind of racist, sexist foolery to expect. But now with the generation of sons, our executioner is wearing a smile and spouting all sorts of feel-good corporate-y doublespeak. Now, we’ve got not one man among them. Just little boys like Elon Musk with his cruel, haughty smile—Lord Byron without the cravat—buying companies when it suits them and then running them into the ground.
  
  Musk is even threatening to buy Substack, which is what you’re reading right now. This would be a disaster for me, personally, and a loss for you as a smart curious reader. Trust me when I tell you, Musk will do the same thing to Substack that he’s doing to Twitter, which is to disembowel it like a jackal.
  

• Digital autism is but one of a raft of disorders that has arisen from overuse of social media. We now have an entire generation of young people that doesn’t know how to interact in real life, suffers crippling self-esteem issues from scrolling through thousands of other users’ filtered, digitally enhanced selfies, undergoes vicious online attacks and bullying, and in its pain and confusion becomes attracted to what I call “trauma porn,” users who make their personal hell attractive as a part of their online persona. Case in point: the surge of depression, anxiety, and self-injury among teen girls since the rise of social media. Cutting/self-mutilation is just one part of the tragedy.
  
  Young people who know nothing about life shouldn’t be learning about it from social media. They should be learning about it from experience.
  

• Perhaps my favorite OpenAI monster is the newly minted ChatGPT. Talk about beholding the face of your destroyer! ChatGPT generates flawless, sophisticated text in response to any prompt you can imagine. Type in “Description of cryptocurrency in the style of Shakespeare,” and you will actually get something back that you could hand in to a tenured university professor.
  
  And believe me, that’s exactly what’s about to happen. It will be well thought-out, correctly spelled and punctuated, and better than anything most students could produce on their own. When the vast majority of Americans can’t distinguish between you’re/your/yours and their/there/they’re, even after 12 years of schooling, perhaps the loss won’t be that great. But think of the long-term cost to all of us: novels that are machine-made and not manmade. College essays that can pass a plagiarism smell-test but come out of a computer prompt.
  
  Since ChatGPT is using scraped information anyway (everything that was written by humans and put on the internet), creativity will no longer be borne of inspiration, just a series of ones and zeros. Our ability to express ourselves coherently, to imagine, to organize our thoughts, to mount a logical argument, to think critically, all of this will be forfeit.
  

• Online dating is a cesspool of swipe-to-the-right. Ask any single friend of yours who is brave enough to use dating apps what his/her/their opinion is, and what will surprise you is how hope springs eternal. Sex is an expected part of the online ritual sacrifice. Most of these virtual “relationships” start out with a flurry of initial activity that may include the exchange of edited nude photos, the cute-meet, the hookup, and then the ghost. In other words, people go for coffee, have sex, and then never see each other again, even if at least one of the parties involved ends up feeling used. Why bother working on a normal, human, messy relationship when you can just keep scrolling?

It took 75 years for the telephone, which was launched in 1878, to gain 100 million users. Now, the gap between invention and use-of-that-invention is frightening small. No one is gatekeeping anymore. We’ve become one long, inescapable episode of Black Mirror. Sex robots might be a cure for lonely socially awkward people, but how motivated is anyone going to be to have children if they can get their sexual and emotional needs met by something they purchased online at a high-tech Toys R Us? After all that plasticine perfection, how likely will it be that we will find ourselves attracted to our flawed human counterparts, especially when certain acts are off limits and they bleed once a month?

Should we be alarmed? Yes.

The idea of designer babies, a baby that has been artificially created by genetic code manipulation, is equally chilling. We aren’t psychologically equipped to handle this kind of technology. We aren’t stopping to consider the consequences of our actions. We aren’t waiting to find out before we just plow ahead, devil take the hindmost.

Now, in a world where deepfakes are possible, where entire governments can potentially be overthrown because of them, we are learning to distrust what our eyes and ears are telling us, which will in turn make us ever more nihilist. Retail is in freefall because of AI. We’ve become a self-service world. Every time we go to the store and check out using a kiosk, we’ve taken work away from a cashier. Shopping malls will soon become completely obsolete—not a loss, you say, and I can’t disagree—but that means millions of people will be out of jobs. Secretaries are being replaced by Virtual Assistants. Businesses rent computing power instead of installing expensive office equipment and then hiring an IT team to run it. Piracy is rampant. Any book, movie, or song can be consumed for free by those who know where to find it. The idea of copyright is fast becoming a 20th century joke.

Accountants, paralegals, benefits managers, payroll clerks, utility meter readers, traders, all these middle-class jobs are disappearing. Many of these people, even if they did retrain for a different job, would find themselves aged out of the market. What are they supposed to do? The rise of like-minded groups on social media (e.g., “Stop the Steal,” Oath Keepers, Incels, Nazis) are not quite the same as the Jane Austen book club. We are poorer, less safe, more exposed, and more depleted than ever before despite this new AI “paradise”.

On the balance sheet, tech is winning and we are losing. We will continue to lose. Even those who eschew tech, delete their social media apps, become refuseniks, it’s too late.

This is the Matrix, and we are powering the battery.

Frankly, I don’t see this ending well. I hope I’m wrong. I’ve got kids, for heaven’s sakes. But throughout history, every aspect of human technology has had a dark side, including the bow and arrow.

The flaw isn’t even in the technology. It’s in us. We aren’t equipped to feed the monster we’ve created.

Perhaps the best we can hope for is that we experience so much cognitive and emotional overload, we kill the machines before they kill us.

And yes, it may actually come to that.

Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin

I know you’ve got thoughts after reading this. I want to hear them. Feel free to disagree with everything I’ve said, but leave your comments in the comments section below.