On Technology

Information technology is everything. For decades it has been shaping our world more every day, molding our lives in its image and subtly shifting our behaviors, coming to utterly define our current era as the Information Age. The transistors that serve as the cells of our computers have shrunk nearly to the size of atoms. Information technology has become the turnstone of the business world, and it will likely continue to be powering the engine for at least another century. However, as those who first brought this incredible technology into our lives enter history books, I want to ask some questions: are the heirs to this technology using it for good? Will artificial intelligence be used to help the citizen whose data is used to train it? Is our data simply being used to make the most possible amount of money for the executives who own the code?

After the initial computer boom, social media companies turned their attention to data. Little bits of information about us, like how long we watch ads for, or what type of shows we like to watch in our free time, or what pet food brands we buy. ALL of these little shards of our social spirit were turned into packages of info to be sold to not just the highest bidder, but any bidder who could afford it. The sum of our choices was compacted into little silicon crystals and our avatars turned into products which these technologists gobble up to feed us more tailored slop in the forms of ads for sports betting, fast fashion, and cheap plastic waste. Were we compensated?

The footprints we left in the digital sand are used to trace where we traveled and then to predict where we will go. In the most extreme cases, they can determine if we live or if we die. When United Health Group designed an AI algorithm which sought to deny life and maximize profits, the data used was that of its own customers. Is this the hill we will die upon? Algorithmic murder for profit?

Like a child that has found itself too deep in a rogue ocean current, a western culture built upon moral rigor, intellectual contest, and feats of athleticism is being drowned by waves of new technology, each harder and harder to understand, and each carrying more power and more danger. To the tech CEO, soul harvesting is the goal, the best way to maximize data profitability. For us humans whose souls are being harvested, this is a slow and drawn-out process of spiritual colonization. There is no law being broken, there is no crime being committed. No governor or president could have predicted this when drafting codes or forming constitutions.

This is why both the foundation, and the fundamentals must be changed. This is not a conclusion reached through despair or self-hatred. I do not believe that the creators of this technology were the same men as the spineless Machiavellians which will inevitably come to wield it. The institutions themselves are not directly to blame either, as the markets move indiscriminately and if these data giants were to fail then other actors would certainly take their place in the technocracy. Nevertheless, at the present moment Alphabet and META play the primary role of data brokers, with X, Reddit, ByteDance (TikTok), and Amazon serving as secondary competitors. Apple, Microsoft, and NVDIA, which mostly relegated themselves to supporting roles, serve as the supporting instruments of the mental colonial order.

It is with deep and solemn prayer that I reflect on these misgivings. The interconnectedness between millions if not billions of humans is unprecedented, and when children are introduced to this system without proper guidance, the result is a disaster for ungoverned animalism. A major strength of the Great Chinese Firewall stems from the protection it provides netizens, both young and old, from the decadency and degeneracy present on the Western Internet, yet simultaneously it creates an ideological and epistemic limit on what can emerge out of that great civilization.

Nevertheless, the West is far from sinless. Far too few American scientists examine the deep and disturbing caches of information that proliferate across the “free internet”. Reddit, 4chan, X, Facebook, Instagram, and an innumerable number of more obscene forums and exchanges garner social capital by masquerading as “free love”, “free speech”, or “free press” while spreading images of obscene sex acts, degenerative social messages, or damaging mistruths. The prevalence of these websites as a percentage of internet traffic is significant and concerning (over 30% of internet traffic is pornographic alone), and the effects that they might have on long-term cultural cohesion, mental health, and both pre-pubescent and pubescent development is yet to be understood.

The corrosion to the social order that these decadent and degenerative ideals pose should be of utmost concern in the minds of academics, sociologists, and psychologists across the world and the globalized internet. With their immense capital, it’s entirely possible that technocratic powers have consolidated these individuals into their ranks, hopefully guiding these corporate entities into the next several decades and beyond. Perhaps ultimately this will result in avoiding a destructive waste of degenerative social order, or perhaps technocrats will simply re-frame the problem as one of the failure of individual self control, instead of a crime against our free will in the name of wanton profiteering.

I pray that we still look to those of us most knowledgeable on the nature of social man, those most qualified to comment and critique the epistemic theory of social order, for the guidance in quality of character necessary for a good life. Yet I increasingly worry that the profit maxim has seduced the atheistic scientists, and the potentially massive communal benefit of their wisdom is utilized instead to deploy and manipulate the algorithms and systems to increase profit for technocrats and colonize our minds through the control of our information and attention. The result of this would be a digital culture of hypercapitalism, hyperconsumption, and hyperfreedom, with each head of the hydra ready to devour the lost soul of the ungrounded, the jaded, and the disillusioned.