In the world of Frank Herbert’s Dune, the human race had already fought it’s war against the machines. In the wake of the victory over the “thinking machines”, ten thousand years earlier, those that survived created the Orange Catholic Bible, a religious text that was to be strictly enforced. Chief among this text’s tenets was, “Thou shalt not make a computer in the image of a man’s mind”, for the obvious reason that never again should the human race face the horrors of an A.I. holocaust. I think about this tenet from a fictional world more and more lately because it sometimes feels we’re rapidly approaching a point in time when something similar may be necessary for technological progress and even our species to continue.
Everything is “connected” now. Appliances, cars, houses, even entire cities are networking as much technology as possible, all in the name of the god of our age, “Data”. It’s all done for the sake of data, and algorithms and A.I.’s are created to sort and interpret that data, and then spit out directives. “All things are possible through Data” is the implied invocation offered up to this information age god, and it’s full steam ahead to feed it as quickly as possible. So the development of ever more intrusive ways to gather “data”, to track individuals to the point of predicting their future actions “Efficiency” is the supposed end-goal of data collection, but that data is being used by governments to build the most perfect prison that has ever existed: one in which the inmates believe they are still free.
The inmates of this prison gladly feed information necessary to sustain this prison through the use of “social media”, an ingenious platform that exploits a “flaw in human psychology” as Sean Parker aptly phrased it, where users quickly develop an addiction to the dopamine high of ‘likes’, views, more and more attention from their peers. The “social-validation feedback loop” has become the Trojan horse that allows Big Tech and government to persuade us to surrender our private lives.
And so the technocratic Elite keep the masses subjugated with free ‘social media’, gladly gulping up the data produced by billions of fingers tapping away at phones. The data is then consolidated, algorithmically synthesized, copied, and sold. To governments, other corporations, anyone who can pay.
Is there an escape from this technological opium den? Our privacy gone, our movements tracked, our interests, friends, and plans known to those in power, and we stand naked before the State. But the vast majority of us do so willingly. And now, Big Tech has become the arbiters of acceptable speech, and the once-freewheeling, free speech internet is coming back under the yoke of the Elite.
It’s imperative to plainly ask ourselves whether this level of “connectedness” enhances our well-being in any meaningful sense, taking into account what is given up in the process. We should ask ourselves whether this sense of well-being is really nothing more than the addiction to the instant hit of dopamine we receive when we get the immediate feedback from posting a picture, a comment, etc. online. Chances are, it’s the addiction. Look at the Big Data industry that has been built upon that addiction. Now we must ask ourselves, how much more “connectedness” is in store for us in the future? Will it be more gadgets that we simply can’t refuse? Is the elimination of privacy really inevitable? Does technological progress inexorably entail ever greater advances in social media and data collection only? Is this the true end of history, when the human race has settled into an easy slavery to “connected” technology? How much digital “convenience” can we enjoy before it becomes self-defeating? Is it worth the digital slavery to our devices, let alone the invisible Surveillance State being constructed around us?
