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We are not products of these platforms so much as the labor force. We dutifully read, click, post, and retweet; we become enraged, scandalized, and indignant; and we go on to complain, attack, or cancel. That’s work. The beneficiaries are the shareholders. For what Silicon Valley really chose to learn from the AOL debacle is that the true product of any of these companies is the stock.
But further research has suggested that after people have gained power, they tend to behave like patients with damage to the brain’s orbitofrontal lobes. That is, the experience of wealth and power is akin to removing the part of the brain “critical to empathy and socially appropriate behavior.”
As NYU business professor Scott Galloway has explained, “we’ve decided that capitalism means being loving and empathetic to corporations, and Darwinistic and harsh towards individuals.”
The apps and platforms are indeed designed to disrupt markets, but primarily for the purpose of extracting wealth from the poor and delivering it to the rich. Amazon makes book publishing more “lean” by leveraging its monopoly to seize a bigger share of profits than regular bookstores did. Uber drivers make less than cab drivers and restaurants lose their margins to Grubhub. This is not creative destruction, but destructive destruction—all justified as the inevitable tide of forward progress.
The Mindset considers human beings so unnecessary, even burdensome, that the business plans for many startups are rejected if they can’t demonstrate that their operations will one day be fully automated. A few employees are fine while a company is getting going, but eventually all of those skills need to be automated in order for the company to “scale” infinitely. This is why Facebook wants AIs or—at worst—its users to monitor and tag offensive posts instead of paid human employees. Any solution that involves valuing human labor risks slowing things down.
Jeff Bezos has a yacht with a helipad that serves as a companion yacht to his main yacht, which has large sails that would get in the way of his helicopter during takeoff and landing. There is no such thing as enough.
The only real answer, the really simple one that neither philanthrocapitalists nor green technologists want to hear, is that we have to reduce our energy consumption altogether. Degrowth is the only surefire way to reduce humanity’s carbon footprint.
I kept asking myself, how could someone so smart have come to join this cult, believe this stuff, and engage in these antics? But maybe I was confused because I was seeing it the wrong way. Cult members aren’t usually actively angry, but pacified and complacent. After all, they’ve found The Truth. They’re smiling, not griping or complaining that their griping has been de-platformed. No, this wasn’t really a cult so much as a case of classic internet addiction. Do we ever ask, “How could someone so smart have become an addict?” No, because addiction is triggered and maintained by a whole
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They were—and still are—addicted to staying online and reading and scrolling until they get that little dopamine rush that comes from connecting one dot to another. Fauci, China, Gates, 5G, Epstein, transhumanism … ah! It’s delightful.
The gamified values of The Mindset have trickled down to people who believe they are finally taking the red pill, escaping the simulation of the Matrix and seeing the real world as it truly is. They hate Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg for their globalist ambitions, their eventual “censorship” of conspiracy theories, and their alliances with Democrats. Yet they embrace the opportunity to be just like those self-appointed masters of the universe, remaking the world as if playing a “God game” on the computer. Accepting their role as “users” of social media platforms who actually
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(nobody actually reads books, anymore, except you)
In trying to face down the union, Google’s “director of people operations” (a failed euphemism for human resources if ever there was one) made a predictable argument for technology’s ability to solve labor problems by allowing the company to engage “directly with all our employees”—much in the fashion that Amazon engages “directly” with its customers, each individually. What the technologists working at the very heart of the world’s biggest tech companies realize, however, is just how disempowering such individuation can be. They are the ones programming the platforms that do this to us, so
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“Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.”
“If a superior alien civilization sent us a message saying, ‘We’ll arrive in a few decades,’ would we just reply, ‘OK, call us when you get here—we’ll leave the lights on?’ Probably not—but this is more or less what is happening with AI.”
Or, as the Grateful Dead’s tour publicist Dennis McNally once reminded me when I lost my backstage pass, “Relax, man, the real show’s out there in the crowd.”
We’ve never seen a society avoid fascism when it gets to this stage of economic inequality, or a civilization avoid collapse when it has taxed its physical environment to this extent.
The principles for building a more circular economy that isn’t dependent on growth are straightforward. Keep resources and revenue recirculating through the community, and accessible to the working class. Leverage the power of mutual aid to lift up one member of the community at a time, each according to their need. Maintain independence from big employers and disinterested investors by owning businesses cooperatively with other workers.
Amazingly, even if everyone does a whole lot less, we still have more than enough food and energy to go around.
There is ample food, water, and energy for everyone. There’s just not enough to satisfy economic models that depend on infinite exponential growth. Attempting to produce that much would end civilization as we know it.
And it’s more than wishful thinking. As new research into “polyvagal theory” now suggests, there is a strong neurophysiological basis for our ability to communicate, attach, and interact with others. Most simply stated, our nervous systems do not operate independently but in concert with the other nervous systems around us. It’s as if we share one collective nervous system.
We can’t “fix” the world, there’s no “Great Awakening,” and no opportunity for “exit.” There’s only the process.
