As technology gives, so does it take away

In 2008, when I thumbed over the screen of my brand new iPhone, I almost couldn’t believe my eyes — or my hands for that matter. It wasn’t just the newness of the slick, glossy surface either; it was the fact that I could read the web while walking down the street, take photos and send them easily to family and friends.

It sounds so naive to say now, but I was full of wonder. How was one to know at the time that the iPhone and its related digital technologies would, in addition to their many positive and even wondrous elements, also usher in a new kind of dystopia: a world where surveillance was normalized, basic human interaction was a thing to be “monetized,” and the mental health of many was impacted by screens?

So this week, when Amazon announced a slew of products — including a small, mobile robot on wheels for the home called Astro that can let you know if you left the stove on, or ferry things from room to room — it was hard to feel little more than a resigned “meh.”

Far from some kind of collective anhedonia, however, it feels the skepticism is well-deserved. Modern digital tech isn’t just ambivalent, it’s often aimlessly harmful. And, as the wonder has evaporated from tech, it feels asking if it’s worth trying to get it back — or if, perhaps, the wonder was what led us astray in the first place.

That tech has consequences both good and bad is a long-standing historical fact. The Industrial Revolution filled the world with useful goods and also gave rise to crushing forms of work and pollution. Cars engendered new forms of liberty and urban arrangement but led to congestion and road rage, not to mention being a major contributor to climate change.

Even the most fundamentally human forms of technology, like agriculture and writing, also entailed a loss in their invention, whether of the nomadic lifestyle or oral cultures. Whenever technology gives something, it also takes away.

But the digital revolution, instead of just ambivalence, seems instead to promise utopia but deliver harm. A recent study in the journal “Environment, Science and Technology” suggested that while Uber and ride hailing was supposed to make cities and life better, it actually produced a 60 per cent higher cost to society than private car ownership when one considers their harmful impact on congestion, crashes and noise.

Far from improving things, Uber makes life more convenient for a slim group of people who use it regularly, and makes life worse for everyone else.

All the same, it would border on the absurd to say there have been no benefits at all to modern tech. As the child of immigrants and an immigrant myself, the capacity of social media and apps to keep me connected to far-flung family across the globe has been incredible. I owe my career to Twitter where I still find community and inspiration. There is art to be found on Netflix or YouTube, joy in having instant access to the world’s music on Spotify, reassurance to be found in GPS or safety systems in cars. The digital tools we use to work and entertain ourselves can in many ways be incredible.

Rather, perhaps what happened is that in the early period of the digital era, we caught a glimmer of not what just tech itself could do, but what happens to human creativity and innovation when it is unshackled from extractive business models.

When Facebook or a thousand other apps were in the phase of simply growing, the surveillance culture was yet to come. There were, for a short time, few ads or trackers, and the novelty of it all left one with some hope. Something similar might be said for phones, which felt full of promise.

But now in the 2020s, that energy seems to have directed itself toward the mundane or worse: new ways to shop, or only slightly differently, new ways to track people so that they can find new ways to shop.

Under the umbrella of capitalism, big tech is simply a friend to the status quo and the world’s problems seem not just unaddressed but further from solutions than ever.

Climate change remains a looming threat, even if you can pay for a coffee with bitcoin. There is nowhere near enough housing, only cameras to keep an eye on the homeless. Billions still live in poverty and hunger, while the comfortable can order an army of exploited workers to deliver food to their doors.

I’m starting to think that we were seduced by wonder — that the genuine pleasure of novel tech surreptitiously carried with it an ever more intense version of liberal capitalism with a more concentrated form of its ills. But then, perhaps that is the issue: it is simply easier to ooh and aah over a new phone than cheer on new tech that feeds the hungry or shifts us away from carbon-intensive industry.

It’s almost as if the hard work of fixing the world isn’t in fact a technological issue, but a political and social one — and that the sharp, white glow of our screens obscures what lingers in the shadow of the digital era, a world obsessed with new ways of ignoring the problems that are in fact very old.

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