Technology, since the advent of the television, home computer, internet, smartphone, and social media, has put us on a collision course with evolution.
As the rates of connectivity, immersion, and accessibility to technology expand, so too does the annihilation of our connections to how we developed as a species.
If you’re wondering how long these beliefs have been developing, let’s go back over a decade to check in with what I wrote when social media started to take on it’s modern shape.
How are we doing?
Well, I’d say we’re doing…not so well. To put it lightly.
My past self would shudder as to just how prophetic, and under-diagnosed, the disconnected interpersonal wasteland would grow to be in the coming years.
How did we get here in our divide between technology and evolution? And where might we be going?
Let’s dive in.
The invention of the television kicked off one of the greatest increases of information density transfer between humans, solidifying the move from oral and text communication mediums to images and videos.
A picture, after all, is worth a thousand words. That makes a video worth orders of magnitude more.
Then, the proliferation of home computers and gaming systems allowed us to create and connect with fantastic virtual worlds. This accelerated information density transfer further, escalating the ability to capture the mind. Both would start us down the path towards demolishing in-person social connections and a rising sense of isolation.1
The internet hammered the stake in further, giving us instant access to all of humankind’s information on a whim. Gaming, pornography, and gambling quickly grew on the internet to deepen the trenches of where we can easily access some of the grandest distractions ever known. Still, these distractions were tethered and time-limited for most, as the desktops and gaming consoles that ruled the world through the 2000’s were mostly stationary.
That all changed when the smartphone revolution granted us access to all of the above anywhere and anytime we wished.
What also came with the smartphone era was the transplanting of organic social media to algorithmic social media, all on a tiny and endlessly scrollable touch screen. These changes quickly frayed our biologically programmed sense of cooperation, compassion, empathy, connection, and social contracts by hyper-focusing our gazes right into ourselves and all that ails humanity.
Ad infinitum.
The surrounding culture I grew up in taught us to be friendly with your neighbors. It helped create a sense of community and support knowing who you’re living with and putting faces to names. When I wrote Killing us softly over a decade ago, moving somewhere new meant introducing myself to neighbors. Most people were friendly and more than happy to shoot the shit and build an initial connection. Even if it never moved forward from there, there was a certain comfort knowing who I was living around.
When doing these same introductions over the past few years, attempts to build connections have become an exercise in futility. Between seeing confused glares and facial reactions like I’ve just killed their favorite pet, it’s been disheartening seeing the drastic shift in building community through something as simple as getting to know one’s neighbors.
Being social while taking walks and hikes have undergone the same shift. Ten years ago, one could reasonably greet another on a trail or sidewalk and receive positive social feedback in return; a hand wave, smile, nod, and even impromptu conversations. Now, most people I meet outside are deeply engrossed in their phones, audiobooks, podcasts, staring at the ground, or outright ignoring others rather than being willing to engage in the smallest of human connections.
Then, invariably, these people end up in therapy offices wondering why they feel so isolated.
Combining unlimited access to information and potent distractions with a false sense of an increasingly dangerous world helped usher in a great deadening of our brains from hijacking neurochemicals. This helped further entrench the social polarization trends seen today. Both are foundations of skyrocketing depression and general mental illness rates around the developed world.
Soon, artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) will drive the wedge fully into our brains and reality itself, creating the ultimate severance between the humans we developed into being and the ones we will eventually become.
All in the span of about seventy-years.
A blip on the cosmic radar.
Not even a blip, nor a mote of dust compared to the scale of the universe.
If you blink, you’d miss this era of technology millions of times over when compared to the timespan of Earth’s development.
At present, we’re fighting a losing battle against time and human evolution. We are being divided from and between ourselves.
Who will survive the onslaught? How do we escape from this technological hellscape, avoiding the fate of killing ourselves through amusement and unreality?
The answers may lay in the past.
History contains the likely future course of our interactions over the next few years, if not decades; the divide will deepen, at first.
We can already see this in America. More and more elite and upper class workers, and their families, have the flexibility to disengage with technology. Through the freedom of high incomes and increased time-off, their families can seek havens of quiet stillness and can afford to send their children to private schools, secluding them from these technological domains.
This divide will largely affect the poor and working classes, as is tradition for humanity. It’s these classes that will find themselves unable to source the funds needed to escape to the real world and from the technological trappings that enable the continued degradation of the mind.
The freedom higher classes posses comes from being able to opt out of using technology as needed, not from being able to access it.
Ever notice how technocrats don’t allow their children to use the technology they created?
As the upper classes of America continue to march towards nature and the analog, the digital world will run rampant through everyone else.
As physical goods and human experiences are prioritized amongst those who can afford it, and craved by all, they will continue to skyrocket in price until the masses become priced out altogether.
At the highest levels of these upper crusts lie the technocrats of the world; Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and OpenAI. Here lies the greatest centralization of power and information since the Catholic Church right before the invention of the printing press. And these giants are only growing in power and influence, with no legislative regulations in sight here in the States.
Music and culture writer Ted Gioia2 explains the present goal of these modern technocrats, and the companies they own, far more eloquently than I:
We’ve all had happy experiences with new tech. Computers were empowering and gave us more options—until they didn’t. It was easy to ignore glitches and crashes, because the larger direction was upward and onward.
But the rapid acceleration of algorithmic and AI-driven systems—the latest flavor of the month in Silicon Valley—makes clear where we were heading. The goal in the technocracy is now obvious. Just pay attention to what they say.
There’s a reason why the most popular words in tech right now are acceleration, destruction, disruption.
Have you figured out what they want to destroy and disrupt? Here’s a clue—take a look in the mirror.
The class wheel will keep spinning, keeping those without resources in the soma-induced dystopia promised nearly one-hundred years ago.
What no one can predict, however, is how the divide will resolve itself. This is both the source for increasing pessimism and optimism.
Back during previous heightened senses of social tension in history, we still had the evolutionary instincts to fight back that are disintegrating before our eyes.
Then, people were not as distracted from the real causes of suffering. The power of propaganda and neurochemical traps were not as potent as today; it would be haunting what those demagogues of yore would be able to do with the power of the mental traps they could deploy today.
Back then, when the people had had enough, dopamine and attention were plentiful. There was enough to actually mobilize people to action; revolutions of both brain and brawn were as routine as any other human instinct.
With the motivating power of the mind locked behind the vault of technology, and AI continuing to desecrate how humans perceive and filter the real from the unreal, what will the people of the coming years use to fight back?
If our attention and minds are gazing inward and at our screens, rather than outwards and the reality around us, what will be the thrust forward?
I don’t wish for a warfare revolution; hopefully that’s a thing of the past.
War, as always, is hell.
But if not that, what?
One solution, and it’s arguably the hardest one, is to break the power of these technological monoliths. At the forefront is OpenAI, the spearhead for AI development, with their reckless and intentional disregard for basic human safety measures. They, and the other tech giants, have proven to lack the ability and desire to regulate themselves.
These technocrats are the true power brokers, and they represent part of the classes most able to take advantage of the divides already in place and the ones ripening for the future.
Breaking these companies won’t be easy. In their attempts to blind, obfuscate, and manipulate, they’re polluting the entire internet. One sphere at a time, they’re warping our sense of selves and the world around us. One step at a time, they’re attempting to reshape how we perceive and interact with the real world, leaving them untouchable and free to do as they wish.
As writer and neuroscientist Erik Hoel points out in the above linked piece about polluting AI, legislation can be a powerful idea:
The solution…isn’t technical. You can’t detect AI outputs reliably anyway (another initial promise that OpenAI abandoned). The companies won’t self regulate, given their massive financial incentives. We need the equivalent of a Clean Air Act: a Clean Internet Act. We can’t just sit by and let human culture end up buried.
And if legislation and breaking these monopolies are not enough, we, as a species, must forcefully exert our will on these companies to act in benevolence to humanity, not the bottom line. And this revolution won't take place in the classroom and academia. It will play out in society as a whole.
Everyone is needed, because here’s the ugly truth: we accidentally helped create these conditions.
We, in our desire for increasing distractions from high-stress modern lives and technological grandeur, did not take them to task over the years with meaningful, demonstrable actions and consequences for their overreaches.
Eventually, if left unobstructed, these companies (and those they influence) will soak up most of the money, information, attention, and power from the various middle and lower classes of the world.
There will be virtually nothing left.
What then, technocrats?
What happens when this is achieved?
Are you prepared to be kings and queens of the ashes?
You might not like the answer.
What you might create are whole classes of people with nothing to lose.
This is often a key ingredient needed in order for masses of people to rise up and fight for change. This is something to be feared, and a wellspring of optimism; after all, the most dangerous opponent is one with nothing to lose.
For now, people still have things to lose. That won’t last forever.
I would be remiss if I did not mention that technology is also beautiful. Part of the inspiration for writing works like these is to invite and advocate for the immense promise of these innovations that gets corrupted by our darkest and most human impulses.
Seeing where we’ve been and where we might be heading is heartbreaking.
I yearn for a world where AI can, amongst many other wonders, help develop treatment plans and paths forward in therapy. To have a steady, reliable hand where the human mind can understandably falter.
The world is a shining one where social media helps us form lifelong connections across the vastness of time and space. Connections that were never possible until now.
Everyone can benefit from a state of living where the internet stores and distributes the blinding phosphorescence that is human empathy, compassion, and joy.
What I hope with these proposed changes are a return to balance, a return to the whole spectrum of what humanity has to offer. We will lose that if things are left along their present course, like a slow-moving train wreck.
Like never before, our world is turning into a disconnected interpersonal wasteland, and it’s killing us all.
Loudly, this time.
The average information transmission rate for human speech is 39 bits per second, far lower than modern technology:
“In comparison, the world's first computer modem (which came out in 1959) had a transfer rate of 110 bits per second, and the average home internet connection today has a transfer rate of 100 megabits per second (or 100 million bits).
While this doesn’t directly translate to us being able to understand information at that higher density, what it does give us access to is the sheer amount of data for our brains to attempt to process. I wonder, then, what would the effects be of these attempts? I think we’re seeing them on full display already. Our minds are simply not evolved to handle this much information on a daily basis.
Shout out again to Ted Gioia, who continues to write poignantly about our current intersection between technology and culture. This quote is shared from one of his recent articles, “The Real Crisis in Humanities Isn’t Happening at College”.
You can read more of his work here: