One idea I cannot get out of my head is the notion that our technology-driven society is falling apart and technology gets none of the blame. Instead, the solution posed is always more, more, more technology!

Groceries are unaffordable and the response? Dynamic pricing, where automated technology recognizes who can afford to pay more and charges them more for the same product. This is something to celebrate?

This is one example, and I doubt the creators of this technology would frame dynamic pricing as a response to the soaring price of groceries. But that’s how I see it and don’t really care how the grocery tycoons caught red-handed colluding to raise bread prices for 1.5 decades want people to see it.

From where I’m sitting, digital technology only exists so its creators can become middlemen taking a cut from every purchase. It’s like this in every industry. I don’t see how life has improved from decades ago in any meaningful way.

Obviously we have phones now and before we didn’t. So what? Now you can tap a screen and send an errand boy to courier food to your door. Great. Increasingly, with digital culture and xenophobia on the rise, the food courier’s a young South Asian man who can’t afford city life delivering food to someone who wants them deported. Every digital service pitches itself as modern magic, when really it is just a system for dispatching disposable butlers to your door, making them deal with the horrors of traffic so you don’t have to. It’s so hard to find good help. That’s the problem digital technology answers.

Of course digital technology is interwoven through every industry, not just groceries and restaurants. There are a million digital apps for banking and commerce, and what’s the result? Service deteriorates and executives pocket money laid off employees once got. Maybe it goes to shareholders, or it’s used for stock buybacks.   

Put another way, given how everybody technology famously drives our society, and how much people love technology, you’d think that society was going well! It’s broken. Totally broken.

Everyone’s miserable and many are poor. The left know this is true because they’re the ones who are poor, and the right and far right know this too because the wealth is mostly transferring from everybody else to them. Frankly, they’re miserable too. Everyone is. The mood is very bad right now, everywhere.

The fascist right definitely knows society is hopelessly broken, they campaigned on it. Even back in 2015, Trump ran on “Make America Great Again,” the again screaming the US was no longer great. US presidential hopefuls traditionally wrap the flag as tightly around themselves as possible and campaign on three things: U-S-A, U-S-A, and U-S-A. Running on “America is not great!” is a euphemism for “America is fucked.”

Which is true, but sounds like bullshit coming from a mega-corrupt oligarch who as much as anyone else on earth represents what broke America and works everyday to break it further.

It feels like technology once served a clear cut purpose. Phones let us speak to people, they were undeniably, plainly good. Planes make travel easier, or possible. That’s good. What is all this for?

There’s a circularity to it. Technology creates jobs! OK, but what is it all for? All people want is their basics met and some time to relax with friends and loved ones without feeling like making ends meet is hopeless.

Phones make people miserable, depressed, anxious, and for this, people pay out of their own pocket! If digital technology keeps us so connected, as people assume, why are we all so disconnected? Technology is the force atomizing people, keeping us sequestered and separated. It feels to me like people are subsidizing the tech industry, keeping it afloat, with their money and misery, all to keep the economy churning without no other real benefit. The costs are numerous and enormous, the perks are mostly, at best, vulgar distractions. At worse, horrors.

I don’t see how technology helps people.

For what it’s worth, there are certain forms of technology I love. Sun Ra experimented with every new synth and keyboard he could get his hands on. He played with all kinds of strange recording techniques.

I resent that broadly criticizing Silicon Valley can be construed as being opposed to the very idea of innovation. If you want innovation, read James Joyce! Listen to John Coltrane! Those gentlemen innovated. These modern digital putzers are all looking to make money and invent pretexts pitched with elaborate marketing budgets for why their useless creations are not only useful, but essential, revolutionary. The glowing terms they use for this crap are in proportion to how useless it all is.

There’s another cycle worth describing here too. In the way that laundry machines are an unbelievable technology that save people time…OK, but where exactly does that time go? I struggle to reconcile this. It feels like anything that really does save a person time, the person never gets to keep that time. It gets allocated elsewhere before they can blink. Given all the technology surrounding us, you’d think people have nothing but spare time! They don’t.

If technology was merely useless, I could cheerily laugh at it from a distance and go on with my life. But we’re invading countries to take their minerals to keep building this stuff. The labour exploitation, the climate and ecological destruction…all of that is horrible. And on a basic level, it all strikes me as useless and profoundly boring. On a purely aesthetic sense, it’s all dogshit.

Things were fine before digital technology took over. Better! Now every company is looking to be the Uber of whatever, when really the best way to get around a city is walk or take transit or bike, and Uber’s model was only sustainable because it coasted on vast private funding from Saudi Arabia, and operated with impunity facilitated by ultra-elite lobbying (within like three days of living in New Delhi, I met ex-Obama aide David Plouffe at the Habitat Centre at a talk he was giving about Uber in his capacity as a lobbyist…he didn’t answer my question about Uber operating in legal grey zones to my satisfaction, but tried to), and for years never turned a profit.

I just want to play guitar and read some books and listen to music with people. Watch some movies. Digital technology brings nothing to my life. There are some excellent YouTube breakdowns of music and stuff like that. Of course these platforms support cool cultures: anythign that connects people is cool, because people are cool. But overall, the costs greatly outweigh the benefits. I really think it’s healthier for people to get their life’s satisfaction from artists, not the self-interested leaders of boring exploitative corporate junk. Check out Tolstoy and Gogol, not Mark fucking Zuckerberg, Peter fucking Thiel, or any of those titans of dorkdom.

I don’t care which streaming platform offer movies someone else made years ago, before Netflix even existed. For people to act like these platforms created the art, when really they’re just digital middlemen, strikes me as sad and even pathetic. Worshipping Netflix instead of people like Scorsese is like loving Fender, not Jimi Hendrix. (Actually to be fair, Fender contributed much more to Hendrix’s music than Netflix does for cinema, and I do respect and love that company. But it’s not Jimi!).

Maybe some cultural snobbery is bleeding into this, but if so, it’s because the digital world only has room to promote itself and leaves little space for others. The digital kingpins like ruling the roost, they make the country’s policies. They believe, with justification, that presidents and prime ministers work for them, and a world where people are fulfilled by something they have nothing to do with is not a world they want us to live in. And sure enough, we don’t.

So it’s hard for me to get behind digital technology. There isn’t a perspective where I care about it or respect it even a little. Nobody needs a fucking smart fridge! It’s all just excuses to increase our exposure to advertising and mine our data. Frankly somebody needs to put these fuckers in their place. If anything, I think Rogers should pay us to suffer the burdens of phone ownership, though if the Blues Jays sign Bo Bichette and Kyle Tucker I could change my view on this.