The New Hatred of Technology

People have never gotten better, here in the year of Our Imitation 2024, at hating the fundamental forces of that impersonation—at hating, in other words, digital technology itself. And good for them. These technocrats who work everywhere do not just lean, in their position on the trend, on the vague, the nostalgic, the technophobic. emotions again. Now they have research papers to back it up. They have bestsellers by the likes of Harari and Haidt. They have their own trick picture-calculations. Children, I don’t know if you have heard that they are killed by the class.

None of this bothers me. Yes, teenage suicide is obviously bad, but it’s not hard to argue against technology. What is difficult to eliminate, and what worries me, is an exception, in my estimation, to this rule: the argument against technology given by the modern philosopher.

By philosopher, I don’t mean a glorified self-help math writer. I mean a serious analysis, read in a funny way, someone who breaks problems down into their proper pieces so that, when those pieces are put together, they don’t look the same. Descartes didn’t just say “I think, therefore I am” in his head. He had to walk a long way in the middle his head as he would humanly, stripping everything else, before he got to his one line. (And God. People always seem to forget that Descartes, the founder of so-called common sense, could not strip God.)

For someone trying to mount a case against technology, a Descartes-style line of attack might go like this: If we get as far from technology as possible, we strip away everything else and break the problem into its components. , where do we end up? Right there, of course: in the literal bits, the 1’s and 0’s of digital counting. And what do the pieces tell us about the world? I’m simplifying here, but very much: everything. A cat or a dog. Harris or Trump. Black or white. Everyone thinks in binary terms these days. Because that is what is enforced and focused by the best machines.

Still, in short, the most impressive argument against digital technology: “It binarizes,” computers teach us, “and therefore I am.” Some experts have been making versions of this Theory of Everything for a while now; Earlier this year, a professor of English at Dartmouth, Aden Evens, published what, to my knowledge, is the first synthesis of philosophy, Digital and its Discontents. I have a little chat with Evens. Pretty boy. He says he’s not a technophobe, but still: It’s clear that he’s historically depressed around the world about digital life, and he’s taking that depression away from the basics of technology.

I might agree, once. Now, like I said: I’m worried. I am not satisfied. The more I think about the technophilosophy of Evens et al., the less I want to accept it. Two reasons for my dissatisfaction, I think. First: Since when are the basic units of anything else say all its high-level speech? Genes, the basic units of life, account for only a small percentage of how we develop and behave. Quantum-mechanical phenomena, the basic units of physics, have no effect on my physical actions. (Otherwise I’d be walking through walls—when I’m not dead, half the time, I’m dead.) So why should binary digits define, at all times, the limits of computation, and our knowledge of it? New behavior always has a way, when complex systems interact, that emerges in a mysterious way. Nowhere in each bird can you find a gathering algorithm! Turing himself said that you cannot look at computer code and know, completelywhat will happen.

And two: Blaming technological insatiability on 1s and 0s treats the digital as an end point, as some kind of logical conclusion to the history of human thought—as if humanity, as Evens suggests, has finally achieved the dreams of Enlightened thinking. There is no reason to believe such a thing. Computing, for most of its history, not digital. And, if the predictions about the return of analog are correct, it won’t stay digital for long. I’m not here to say whether computer scientists should or shouldn’t modify chips equally, to say that, it would have happenedit would be foolish to say that all the two things that exist today, completely ingrained in us by our digitized devices, could simply collapse into a different and glorious analog complex. We are inventing technology. Technology does not invent itself.