Where do we go from here? Can we hope to reverse this massive power/freedom transfer imposed on us by the Voldemort Virus? Where is the technology taking us? These are complicated questions because technology changes us as it evolves; and we evolve with it. But, it seems, never in quite the way we expected. In fact when history records how it all went down, in the end we can’t trust the history.
First we have to understand what we mean when we use the word “technology.”
Technology, we think, began with fire. Or, hunting weapons. Spear points, maybe. We don’t know for sure because we weren’t there. But we can be pretty sure the first invention came from the arsneal of tools you have to have to kill an animal, cook it and eat it. Vegans, lacto-ovo, health nuts and other meat-haters would protest that the rabbit-food diet came first so their tools must have come first, but that won’t work because you can eat that pottage without tools. We must have built things first to take down the small game. Traps, maybe. But also fire.
Community arrived, with all of its challenges, when someone killed something too big for their family or clan to eat. Others who were outside the clan wanted some, because the smell of the pig meat over the fire was delicious, they’d never experienced anything like it. Anyone who’s smelled pork roast at a barbecue understands this. Pigs, I surmise, were built by God to smell good over a fire, to serve as a launching point for what came next. After a few false starts, some “sucks to be you,” and some rotting pig carcasses lying around going to waste, the clan had to settle on the unavoidable thought: We have nothing to gain by keeping this to ourselves, we can’t eat all of it. And so multiple families would gather around a common fire with a common carcass roasting over it, because, why not? What a beautiful evening that must have been. The birth of community. Think about this when you have those cookouts King Joe is thinking about maybe allowing you to have. You’re celebrating the first time humans became genuinely better, through their own innovation.
And from this came a question: Can I have seconds?
And so community arrived with its first challenge: Apportionment. We have gathered together to bring a demand commensurate with the supply. How do we figure out who gets what? And so there was capitalism. There was ownership. This caveman brought down the boar. That caveman did not. Therefore, he must remit a service. Professions, starting with “the oldest profession,” came from that. “Performance reviews” came from that. If a hunter sucked at hunting, it wasn’t just an isolated opinion, it was evident to everybody.
With just this much technology, and no more, there was merit. If a “leftist caveman” tried to “earn” a bigger share of the roast pig by way of his charisma, giving fancy speeches, or writing poetry, he would have been ostracized. Perhaps leftism got a brief but abortive start back then when community was born. The conversation would have been very short. “You did not hunt the pig, what will you do to earn more?” “I know, I’ll make all the decisions about who gets how much, so you don’t have to worry about it! How’s that?” “Hmmmm…fuck off.”
We’ll never know for sure, but we do know you need some more technology to sustain that nonsense. Cavemen wouldn’t have tolerated it. We tolerate it just fine.
The nonsense might have started with simple machines. Maybe with the wheel. Look what I built! It rolls! That’s really great…I have no idea what you did and I can’t understand how it works, so use your wheel to bring me things. Uh, what? And so slavery was born. And the dysfunction that enshrouds us, to this day, was born. He who can do things, must serve the one who doesn’t bother to try.
The guy who fixes your computer will understand this perfectly. He knows how to do something, you don’t know how to do it. So you get to order him around like he’s your little bitch because you “need” him to do it. You break the computer, he fixes it, after he leaves you find you can’t do the thing you used to be able to do, so you blame him. This is why he hates you.
Ah well…maybe I’m letting my personal experiences get in the way. Slavery must have existed before tech. It is the default condition. It’s our Original Sin. Although, if technology can’t be blamed for our desire to enslave others, we probably can blame it fairly for enabling our hunt for excuses. Before technology there was only one justification for it: I’m bigger than you are and I’ll kill you if you don’t serve me. With technology, as kingdoms and civilizations rose and fell, the excuses thrived and multiplied. The Sun God Ra, or Jupiter, or Yahweh, or Allah, put me and my friends in charge. Our secular types fancy themselves to have ended all that, but they haven’t ended anything at all. Instead, they’ve started something, and what they’ve started is a whole new round of these excuses.
We’re doing it for “the workers.” They have nothing to lose but their chains.
Vox Populi Vox Dei; the people chose me. You have to do what I say.
We have to decrease the surplus population. We can’t have undesirables breeding faster than normal, better people.
We’re just taxing you to make you pay your fair share.
A lot of evolving civilizations older than ours, and ours included, claim to have “ended slavery.” It would be nice if that were true. But you don’t need cotton fields or whips and chains to have slavery. It’s in the human heart. Theft of services is our default behavior. Technology has served to highlight this, and often to eliminate it by getting rid of the opportunity. But it’s also given us new opportunities for slavery.
The latest is “climate change.” People with access to the instrumentation that can measure our climate, have begun publishing alarmist gossip about the measurements they’re making. They can detect variations they weren’t detecting before, which stands to reason because the instrumentation is more precise than it used to be. But it’s really just a new wave of Malthusianism — the Chicken-Little “sky is falling” screed that humans will overpopulate the planet and deplete its resources, triggering a mass extinction event.
It’s true that the Earth has seen mass extinction events. But if the past has taught us anything about these events, it’s that when they’re sudden, they require sudden triggers. History has all but falsified the notion of population, or any other gradually changing metric, slowly trudging toward some “tipping point” and setting off a cataclysm. The Earth is a living thing, and living things adapt to changes on a micro scale by way of adjustments on a micro scale. The Malthusian dread did not come to pass, because as the population increases, resources become available to service them, until they can’t for whatever reason. And where the resources are no longer available, the population doesn’t increase there. It increases somewhere else. It’s how nature works. It’s really quite amazing.
Carbon in the atmosphere works the same way. There’s no such thing as “too much” of it. If you get a heavy saturation, what you have is a global environment that’s just a tiny bit friendlier to plants and a tiny bit more hostile to animals. So in a few generations you’ll have more plants and fewer animals. It works both ways. If there isn’t “enough” carbon you’re going to get more animals and fewer plants. It’s like a pendulum, and the fossil record shows it’s been working that way. Again, it’s all really quite amazing.
Ah…maybe I’m wrong about all this. The above contains all sorts of stuff I can’t prove, just like the existence of God is something I can’t prove. These are matters of faith, and inferential reasoning based on circumstantial evidence, and my knowledge of history and technology, which I admit fall short of what could be considered exhaustive, or even commanding. I’ve been waiting for years with an open mind to see something that will upset it and require a macro-scale rethink. Occasionally it’s happened, and now, in 2021, that’s where I am. That’s how I see it. Technology made us better, thousands and thousands of years ago, when it created a necessity and offered a reward for our coming together and sharing things. Since then, it’s done some amazing things but it hasn’t made us better people. The Internet was supposed to have done that. It was supposed to make us better informed. Then someone figured out that a lot of what’s on the Internet is nonsense. And so we needed “fact checkers.” But no one with a working brain takes the fact checkers seriously anymore, because fact checking has devolved into just one more way for unproductive people to mold and shape the most intimate aspects of the lives of more productive people. There we go again. Another excuse. So no, the Internet has not made us better. It hasn’t even made us more informed. We can probably credit it for clarifying our thinking about challenges that were confronting us before we had the Internet, so that our responses to the challenges improve. But on the whole, the Internet has been an exercise in over-promising and under-delivering. Buying and selling things is quicker and more convenient, thank goodness. There are always cat pictures. And who can ever get tired of 
nice looking women soaking up the sun, using fish as bras? But, life goes on, and we just keep on truckin’, now with Internet.
Others in my profession do not see it that way. They look forward to some near-future event, just around the corner. Some prognosticate a terrible event, like war, famine, disease, the above-mentioned “climate change” apocalypse. Others foresee something glorious, a “technological singularity,” in which the automatons attend to their own programming and do it so well, and so quickly, that human suppositions about anything & everything will become irrelevant.
They’re succumbing to emotional reasoning. You can tell this because the event that’s going to change everything and turn it all upside-down, is always just around the corner. That’s what commands attention, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that that’s what’s really true. And it has not escaped my notice that my colleagues who most enthusiastically look forward to the technological singularity, are the ones who speak of success and failure only in vague terms, obfuscating and avoiding questions of cause and effect. They speak of this country over here, or that company over there, “doing/did it right” and that other one “doing/did it wrong.” You would reasonably expect, if you were to take these verdicts seriously, there would be a meticulously fleshed-out recipe bundled in showing how the successful entity did it “right” so that other attempts can follow suit. The pattern I’ve noticed is that you very rarely get that, and if you don’t get it, what you’re seeing is essentially cheerleading, not the sober, reasoned assessment of the results it’s pretending to be. I have also noticed these emotional-reasoners, in assessing the processes that turned out “right” or “wrong,” form their opinions in echo chambers. They compare notes with others who think like they do. They don’t ask the people most directly impacted. Some of them build things. But it isn’t in their pattern to hang around after someone has used their creations, and gather end-user evaluations, wart & all.
I do not believe technology is bringing us to a singularity. This is not to say I doubt the ability of automatons to program themselves. That much has already been done. The ramifications for the field of cryptography are real, interesting, and promising. But for us to experience what they’re talking about, the machines would have to do what the singularity-proponents are not doing, and assess. Note that God, who supposedly does everything perfectly, stops, looks back and assesses. Six times, in Genesis 1, He makes the observation that “it was good” — there is no way to interpret that, without some consideration for a residual potential that it might not have been good. It is, clearly, some sort of question getting settled by means of an assessment. And then the seventh time, at the end of the chapter in 1:31 “He saw that it was all very good.” Six unit tests followed by a system test.
This is a uniquely human contribution to the cycle. Machines, by & large, can’t do it. This is why I reserve a special carve-out for cryptography and maintain some hope for a micro-singularity in that one field, because distinguishing success from failure is so easy: Your algorithm is good, if this other self-programming automated process can’t break it. If that other process can break it, then it’s back to the drawing board with you. I see a potential for getting rid of the human element in that one evaluation chore, but in none other. Singularity-proponents don’t understand this. They don’t evaluate.
With the deterioration of monarchal rule just a couple hundred years ago, the idea emerged that humans ordering other humans around without compensation, just by virtue of having been born into some higher station, is wrong. Here in the United States, we’re dedicated to that. But, we don’t always uphold it. This, I think, is where we’re headed. The unproductive people are going to continue to sniff around for excuses, always with the aim of restoring the feudal system and inserting themselves as a higher layer of aristocracy, ready to tell the rest of us when to jump, how high, when we can come back down again. Technology will continue to evolve and improve, providing the rest of us with more & better tools for getting our work done — and providing them with more & better tools to pull their scams. Young people will fall for these scams, since young people can only acquire the knowledge that comes from others, which requires gullibility. Then they’ll get snookered, and become wise. We’re all going to have to do that as the scammers become more and more sophisticated. Sometimes, we’ll achieve this knowledge without having been suckered into commitments, or having established new entitlements that can’t ever be demolished or reversed. Other times, we won’t be so lucky, and we’ll be trapped.
Meanwhile, the massive increase in public debt from the Biden bail-outs, is a millstone around our necks. In our near future, that’s got some influence. If you’re looking for things to worry about that are imminent, worry about that, because it’s there waiting for us no matter what technology does. Buckle up bitches.
