Hyper-Technology Isn’t Progress
Hyper-Technology Isn’t Progress
The future is ancient
The future is ancient
What does real progress look like in the twenty-first century?
It’s not a trick question.
Is it more social media?
More obscene wealth in fewer hands?
More extreme weather and more polluting?
Higher density mega-cities? Wearable smart tech that tracks us 24/7? Hundreds of millions houseless because of hyper-inflated shelter prices?
More oligarch-sponsored politicians promising to fix everything and then immediately ramming through their identity politics agendas?
An economy where we own nothing and battle for the few wage-slave jobs that are left after automation ravages the workplace?
Or do we just all enter a happy VR simulation and ignore reality forever?
Because that’s where we’re headed.
Trajectory is everything
I say we turn around.
Progress — to me, at least — looks like cleaner air. Drinkable rivers. Swimmable oceans re-stocked with fish. At least eight new feet of soil. Great swaths of wild forest. Organic food. Green energy. Actual democracy. More sovereignty. Less bankers and landlords and menace corporate extractors. More taxes on the elites or more ownership by the poor. Far fewer homo sapiens. More sleep. And far less screens.
Unfortunately, real progress isn’t wildly profitable to financialized tech monopolies. None of these improvements beats pumping Dogecoin.
There’s only one thing we little people can do to turn this ship around: we have to stop buying products from companies owned by elites.
We have to wash our hands of them, so that even if the planet collapses, we can tell our kids we genuinely did our part. We need to be blameless.
But it’s a Catch-22, isn’t it?
Because of the elite’s immense monopoly power and financialization and hijacking of democracy, they can deliver products cheaper and faster. And they’re putting on the squeeze, systematically forcing us to buy from them because we have no other option.
That’s why we need to build citadels.
Resilient communities.
Refugee camps from the hyper-cities.
While the rich buy private islands and yachts and spaceships and live in isolation for the rest of their lives, we’ll at least get to enjoy each other’s company. We’ll plant gardens and trade without currency and rebuild forests and try old things in new ways.
The future is ancient.
The future is local.
The future is personal.
The future is analog.
The future is human-scale.
The future is sustainable.
Or we can just stay on our disastrous elite-controlled digital-everything path.
In that case, there is no future.
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