There is no liberation technology
My father died during the Covid pandemic, suffering a massive heart attack while attempting to get into his car. Despite the urgency of the situation, I struggled to get home. At the time the Irish government had banned international travel, and there were no flights from France to the North of Ireland so that route was also closed to me. In the end, I was able to get in by the back door: at considerable cost and despite extremely officious border enforcement agents in England, I was able to fly to London and then on to Belfast in order to organise my father’s cremation.
Many of us will have stories like this, stories of how lockdown and other pandemic measures had an impact on us. From weight gain to anxiety, from depression to friendships withering on the vine, from unpleasant family disputes to outright domestic violence, the impact was severe.
The one bright spot, I suppose, was that we were able to use technology to bridge the gap in our lives, to some degree at least. Unfortunately, this fact very quickly got mixed up with the information technology sector’s penchant for making fanciful, unsupported claims. Everything could be virtualised, including not only our jobs and social lives, but, by implication, even our very souls. Suddenly, the wild claims of transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil became almost indistinguishable from government policy, as though fearful elected representatives the world over had uploaded their common sense to the cloud.
As a journalist covering the industry, I encounter this on a daily basis: from cloud computing to robotic process automation, genuine but incremental developments are presented as world-changing. The appetite for whizz-bang new is, apparently, insatiable. As a result, non-tech products and services seeking free advertising, such as office lease company WeWork and its founder Adam Neumann’s latest banal adventure in rentierism, apartment letting outfit Flow, are passed off as technology because technology gets attention that leasing offices and apartments do not. More worryingly, blood testing fraud Theranos, founded by Elizabeth Holmes, secured investment by presenting itself as a tech company, black polo neck and all. Had the company sought out investors with experience in the biomedical sciences it would have been laughed out of the room. I think that we can all agree that such a company promising things that it could not deliver is rather worse than either the latest subscription service’s claims that they can make spreadsheets and diary management fun or Tesla’s endless scroll of promises.
Failure under pressure
Information technology, with its, frankly false, garage start-up mythology, addition to ‘crunch’ and ‘hustle’ culture and venture capital-fuelled dream of unparalleled wealth is the worst offender. However, even technology understood more widely than merely information technology has a tendency to fail to deliver on the overexcited promises that attend it. My father, more than once, complained of an unfulfilled promise from the 1960s: that widespread nuclear power would generate electricity in such vast quantities that it would be too abundant, and so cheap, to bother metering. It never happened. Development of nuclear power stalled in much of the world following a green backlash after Three Mile Island and Chernoybl. Unless you live in France, 2022 will have seen you wish electricity wasn’t metered.
With all of that said, I do take an interest in technology, and I recognise genuine progress when I see it.
Amusingly, AI has made some progress. I asked the AI search engine Perplexity for examples of the industry over-promising and its response, its final gibberish sentence aside, is entirely correct:
“The tech industry has a history of overpromising and under delivering, particularly in regards to Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is due to the culture of overpromising that exists in the modern business world. Examples of this include process automation and virtualization, distributed infrastructure, and next-generation connectivity, all of which are trends that companies should track in the year ahead. Additionally, software companies need to revolutionize how they measure business value.”
As I stood outside the crematorium with his brothers and sister and my mother, watching on a flat screen television as my father’s coffin descended into whatever apparently comforting falsehood of a place where bodies destined for cremation go, I was struck by the absurdity of the scene. Just the day before I had been in the very real presence of my late father’s remains, but now I was only able to experience his presence through the intermediation of the technology used to screen sport matches in pubs.
A common refrain during 2020 and 2021 was much of our lives, hitherto conducted face-to-face, could be replaced with apps. Some of it could, but not all of it, and we would not want it even if it was possible.
I am not against remote work. I, myself, have been doing it for over a decade and, frankly, the management class’s eagerness to frogmarch everyone back to the office strikes me as little more than an attempt to reassert control over workers perfectly able to work un-managed. I am grateful, too, for mobile phones, even if I am not sure the smartphone was a good idea.
There’s more: cheap international calls made over the internet have made my exile infinitely more comfortable than that of previous generations of Ireland’s ejected surplus population. Though it has been almost ruined by the proliferation of spam, I still like e-mail. As a child sat in my lonely suburban bedroom, I felt a part of something larger myself by tuning in to broadcasts from around the world on a shortwave radio, an already antediluvian technology, but a technology nonetheless. Later, I watched television from across Europe, delivered by blasting signals into space and re-radiating back down a weak, faint echo, less powerful than a light bulb, over the entire continent.
The rest of our lives, though, especially the parts that really matter, should remain as un-digital as we can keep them.
During the pandemic, I used another technology to speak to my father: the telephone. It wasn’t the same as being there, but it was a sort of connection, so I called him without fail every single day. Every single day, except one, when, fatigued, I instead sent an e-mail. I wrote that I was too tired to talk and would call him tomorrow. He replied, saying OK. The next day, he was dead.
Even without Silicon Valley’s, now obviously dystopian, boosterism, technology would always excite, just as it will repel. It is, after all, the distilled promise of the future: that which is coming in five minutes. Real-soon-now! Liberation is what we seek, as is community: delivery from alienation through techne. Impossible together and unlikely alone, increasingly it seems we get neither.
Truthfully, we all know that the most severe problems we each face are problems that are proper to humans, and, as such, answers to them are not to be found in machines. Zoom calls are no replacement for friendship, and digital transformation will never apply to humanity. Step away from the touchscreen.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers