When Momma Ain’t Happy

You probably sense, as I do, that normality isn’t what it used to be even a few years ago. I’m talking not about Trump or politics but of the magnificent panoply of digital technologies we are immersed if not drowning in. This has bugged me for quite some time spent trying to sort out what forces are driving the complexification of nearly everything and how they are transforming human activities, and by extension human nature. I hate to use the phrase, but might there be some “intelligent design” that drives humans to churn out technology, faster and faster? More importantly, whom or what are we serving with our clever innovations?

Most of us can’t help but notice at some level that we’re being cocooned by technology in an ephemeral matrix we can only partially observe, and now and then worry about. Truth is, this process of enslavement to tools has been going on since well before the discovery of electrons, perhaps since the domestication of fire. Many among us like to invent things, and for some it’s a fetish as much as it is an occupation. Given its antiquity, the urge to doll up our environment can’t totally be blamed on monopoly capitalism or go-for-broke R&D, although those are highly instrumental in complicating our world by giving us more infrastructure, gadgets, choices, and hence desires for things that may not be all that useful, healthful, or reliable. And even if we never wanted them, we come to need them. Someday soon, for example, the course of innovation will surely force me to buy and use a smartphone, a gadget I have no interest in. And I’ll probably have to buy into a blockchain or two, whatever that is. I’m similarly victimized by trends when I try to buy plain old yogurt; now it’s all Greek to me.

My technology angst blossomed at the turn of the millennium. At the time, I was deeply complicit in high tech, churning out a weekly email blast that showcased IT trends identified by analysts from the knowledge factory where I was a trade scrivener. Mostly I was constrained to stick to presenting basic facts — form factors, capabilities, markets, projected unit costs, adoption, ROI, that sort of thing — but every now and then I was able to sneak in observations like “Why do we need this?” or “How might this trend change us as people?” Only once in a great while would a subscriber write in asking the same sort of questions. My readers’ apparent lack of curiosity prompted me to worry about myopia and tunnel vision of those who construct and consider our brave new automated future.

My suspicions that innovation wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be kept me up at night. I looked into it and shortly after the tech crash ejected me from the IT puzzle palace, published a geeky web essay with my dystopic findings and a prescription for personal action. A dozen years hence, those words got folded into a set of essays, an as-yet unpublished volume that nails dystopic theses to the door of the Church of Innovation. It explores the nature of invention and the societal transformations technology has made from different angles — infrastructure, telecom, automation, intellectual property, and several more.

Some of my findings have since been summarized or elaborated on here and there and again, in essays that fret about fetishizing innovation and the creeping technologies and creepy technologists that may yet do us in. But the sad truth is we can’t help ourselves from getting sucked into innovation’s vortex. Not without a popular revolt against corporatism, at least, which I do see happening but not getting much traction. But tackling that subject is for another time.

I’ve concluded that technology springs forth from a force of nature that obliges us to invent stuff. Human beings insist on making tools and have been doing it with a vengeance, even before writing came along. That was a breakthrough technology; transcribing speech changed humanity by making it no longer necessary to carry all our information around in our heads. And so, for a long while, our knowledge and stories took tangible forms that let us share information without utterances. Now, with digital media, more stories than ever are being told, some with sound and pictures. Most, however, are locked into silicon, and without the proper devices are totally inaccessible. I recently explained why this weirds me out, an essay that of course is only accessible digitally. But that’s not what I came to discuss.

For a while, computers have been ordering their human acolytes to help them understand text, images, and speech. Having learned that, computers will insist on generating art and literature for people to consume. The day may soon come when humans pay to subscribe to podcasts of robots reading words that other robots wrote. Translation robots will then enable humans to access the content in a bunch of languages. All that can, in fact, be done with today’s technology, but the content and execution is rather appalling. (On a Mac, for a taste of things to come, you can highlight text, press shift-control-s, and listen at your leisure.) But the ascendancy of AI robots isn’t what I want to talk about either.

Evolution is innovation. Life in general would still be dumb as soup were it not for the force behind its complexification. Not only does life evolve by adapting to its environment, and not only does its code mutate, evolution adds intelligence to the mix. The explosion of knowledge and messages in our species’ brief history is a chain reaction running amok, uncontrolled by any moderating forces I’ve been able to discern. It began in the mists of prehistory, took off with the invention of writing and then moveable type, was ramped up by computation and magnetic memory, and is quickly reaching critical mass thanks to network connectivity.

I’ve come to think of technological innovation as a force akin to evolution, bent on making the planet a thinking being (Gaia goes to school, if you will), and characterize that emergent being as a female personage I call Stepmother Earth, or Silica for short. She wants us to invent things that glorify her and augment her power, and we hastily oblige. We are now busily wiring up Silica’s brain. How she will think of us going forward is another question I lose sleep over. You should too, along with all the damage we’ve been doing to Gaia in the process.

There’s a first draft of the essay collection out there. The work has since been brought in-house, where Silica whispers in my ear to evolve it as quickly as possible. Of course, I realize how fatalistic this talk of technology as an irresistible force of nature sounds and how it plays into the stratagems of tech companies, who love to point out how inevitably wonderful they are making our lives. Their primary motivations, of course, are return on investment and control over our buying and behavior, not the planet’s well being. The essays take companies to task for trumpeting what engines of innovation they are when mostly they’re in the business of appropriating, patenting and suing over intellectual property for the sake of ever-greater market share, all the while pretending that their copycat products are uniquely extra special.

Meanwhile, shackled in invisible chains, we trash the planet. Shouldn’t innovation be done for better reasons than to make as much money as possible for inventors and investors? Raping Gaia only to smother her with crap doesn’t make any sense, but that’s what capital has been doing. When Stepmother wakes up in a wasteland, she’s going to be hopping mad. And when Momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.

When Momma Ain’t Happy was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.