Technology & society #

Technology is useful and it is a yoke — both at once. These notes are about the yoke: how our tools soften us, how consumption eats our attention, and how the manipulable are the profitable.

Technology is a yoke #

Technology is a yoke for humanity. Just as the yoke sits on the ox, humans lay that yoke on themselves — a constraint, something that demands labour and holds you back, like a treadmill (kierat). And these tools soften both the body and the mind.

Trinkets become chains #

Technological trinkets degenerate into real needs, and in the end into a yoke and slavery.

Developers, and resisting the machines #

Many developers you have to talk to as if to a computer program — so wrung dry of everything by programming. They will be replaced by machines — this time by AI — just as cars replaced horses, and diggers replaced the men with shovels. That is why one must be as human as possible, to be resistant to the machines.

The manipulable are the profitable #

The more manipulable you are — by the media, by culture, by the people around you — the more profitable you are. You can be manipulated into believing foolish theories (“gender” and the like), and the more profitable you become, because you buy “eco” cars, second-hand clothes, and the rest. And to be manipulable is to be stupid. And being stupid is evil — the deed of the stupid and of the malicious can be one and the same. So there is no higher moral duty than, first, to rid oneself of stupidity, and second, to acquire erudition.

Consuming life without digesting it #

We live in a consumptionist society, where life itself is consumed but not digested. It is eating life, instead of growing and adding to it — as one adds culture, art, help. And this consumption is like social-media posts: it consumes attention. Modern consumption is attention-based; the platforms lure users, and this competition to lure them is the very nature of those companies. Back to the main point: consuming life without digesting it seems a fair summary of this life of short bursts of attention fired at posts — the glance a woman gives another’s dress, work and constant distraction. To make us stupid? To wear us out? So that we become mindless slaves of the system? Or is it purely mimetic behaviour?

Computers invade #

Computers slowly invade our lives and enslave us. Even where they are useful for some things — like writing this very text — they are everywhere.

Technology is getting worse #

I do feel that technology is getting worse: software and hardware stopped progressing long ago. It is the monopoly of the big tech companies, which colluded and cornered the market.

Faces in the glass #

When I see people staring into their phones, I think of the algae-eater fish in an aquarium, suckered onto the glass.