Technological improvement in human history has been generally about making life better. An essential feature has been bringing the luxuries that once belonged to the rich to the whole of humanity.
There were no eyeglasses, and then there were. Horseshoes and bridles gave these beasts far more power. Mirrors were hard to come by, reserved for royalty and the rich, but then everyone had one. Internal combustion led to greater crop yields and more food for everyone. Indoor plumbing was a wonderful blessing. Sewing machines: magnificent.
So it goes through the history of everything. The World’s Fairs of the 19th and early 20th century were consumer extravaganzas with Ferris wheels, hamburgers, lighting tricks, and glorious new designs and art. It was the same with producer-ready steel, telecommunications, radios and televisions, and of course, cars, which led to far cleaner cities from the old days with livestock roaming everywhere.
This has been the source of the enthusiasm of the mass of the population over technological advance. The very first Smithsonian Museum was devoted to the history of industry and the practical arts. It was magnificent. Now, it is closed and all of its contents sitting in some warehouse somewhere, replaced with a preposterous exhibit about a future that no one particularly wants.
Technology in the past infused the whole culture with a sense of optimism and hope that life would always get better.
Is that still true? Not so much.
I spent the weekend slogging through airports where the new technology drives everything. You can speed up your path through security with a retina scan that creeps out everyone who uses it and the employees, too. You encounter countless machines that require clicks, scans, and apps, with an unrelenting flurry of codes and updates, as your phone battery drains and you are sent scrambling for a plug.
To get anywhere or do anything requires shuffling through cards, digital wallets, screenshots, and sites with two-factor logins, face recognition, and a full spectrum of identity checks tied directly to your bank accounts and digital screens. There’s no more “Papers please.” It’s far worse. It’s detached from physical reality and human minds. We live increasingly in a dehumanized world.
At one point, I was waiting to board, but the plane couldn’t be approved to fly without some machine somewhere to grant permission. The pilots and crew were all there and the passengers were waiting, but the machines kept saying no. There was one delay, then another, then another. Finally, the attendant announced that the flight was a no-go. No explanation. Just suddenly, everyone’s travel plans were ruined.
The app on my phone said differently. It simply would not update. There was some crossed communication going on. The person who announced this found out from the pilot and then told everyone with a microphone. But so far as the digital gods were concerned, the flight was still scheduled. Everyone quickly realized what we all intuitively know: Machines fail, and it’s best to believe an actual person.
Maybe it is possible to travel without dragging around a massive apparatus of digital this and that, but somehow I doubt it. We are utterly dependent on the entire gadgetry for absolutely everything. The kiosks don’t accept cash, so we tap our way to coffee and fruit and a book, and then tap some more for upgrades and check-ins. It never ends.
Then people finally get seated on the airplane, and everyone takes out their digital thing and props it up to be entertained by a movie about life that features a nonstop show built from CGI. We spend the whole of our lives strapped to machines we cannot really control. They are controlling us more and more.
There was a time, only a few years ago, when people thought we could turn off “location services” and then our own property would stop betraying us with surveillance. That little trick seems like a ruse in retrospect, like a limited hangout. Today, there is simply no way. Your phone tracks every step you take. It knows when your plane is up and when it has landed, when you need a car, and where you are staying.
There is no aspect of your life today that is not surveilled. Now the key question: Is this really for your benefit? Increasingly, the answer is not really. Yes, there are always conveniences, but what are we trading in for them and how does the weight of cost versus benefit really turn out in the end? It seems like all this data collection and distribution of our lives is not giving us better lives but simply taking away control.
I was speaking to a driver of a shuttle service about some of this. He offered an interesting theory. He said that he always assumed that the real purpose of COVID-19 lockdowns was to give a test run to a totalitarian digital system. We went “touchless.” The government dropped money into our bank accounts. We spent that money on digital services, whether clicking for our groceries and food or watching stupid movies, because we were forced to stay home. The people without bank accounts were marginalized and excluded. The masters of the data ran the world for a time.
They also became incredibly rich in that period, while our seeming luxuries were quickly inflated away with lost purchasing power and more dependence. It was his view that this was the purpose all along, the whole point of the exercise. It was an experiment in the ultimate dystopia and meant to be the template for how they really want to run the world.
I could not disagree. It does seem like the digital takeover of our lives has been dramatically advanced in the past two years. We are surrounded by screens, codes, authentications, lights, sounds, and everything else.
It’s like nothing really works anymore without an app. And everything runs on a subscription service, so that the hardware is cheap but then you get hooked on a service that is plugged into a major corporation that freely shares its data with government, which further uses that data to impose upon our lives.
We are supposed to be impressed and pleased by every new rollout. But it’s not impressive anymore and not pleasing either.
None of this has the feel of progress. It has begun to feel like the opposite. When was the turning point? It’s not entirely clear. The internet in the early 2000s seemed like the greatest improvement in human knowledge and living standards ever. But after a quarter of a century of this stuff, where is the bounty? Where is the joy and opportunity? It seems like there is less of both than ever.
In addition, the practical skills of the population are in atrophy. This is what happens when you have a forced transition: There is a disconnect between what we use and the ability of the labor force to maintain it. You know this if you have tried lately to get a wall or plumbing fixed. If it cannot be done with a laptop, there is a shortage of people who know what to do.
My own bitterness about all of this traces to my completely incorrect prediction of 2010, that the digital world would emancipate humanity from the physical world that governments around the world fully controlled. I simply could not see how the same rotten institutions would find their way in. But they did. First, they consolidated the industries with high regulation and taxation. Then they compromised them with sticks and carrots. Then they turned them all toward serving government rather than citizens.
And that has left us with a real leviathan that is arguably more of a threat than any we’ve faced in the past. I could not anticipate this (though I’m sure many did), but there is no use in denying it now. What they call “progress” today isn’t really that at all. It is taking us back to a form of government we thought we had left in the past; a high-tech version of feudalism. It’s becoming a convenient form of slavery.
The question remains: Who exactly is benefiting from this transition? It’s certainly not the masses of people.
