Humans 𝓋 Tech: Finding Hope
Tech isn't scary but our failure to regulate it should terrify us all.
It’s been a while.
To be honest, it’s hard to be positive when writing about technology and its inexorable impact on society…
We all know that we’re never going to put the genie back in the bottle … but when we are mindful to protect our autonomy, mastery and purpose, the genie looses some of its mischief.
Most of the scary things on the horizon exist because of only a handful of people. Their organisations exist to scale-up the exploitation of attention, the extraction of wealth and accumulation of control.
From Bannon’s “flooding the zone with shit” approach to politics … to Google, Meta and Palantir’s social-gerrymandering and mass-surveillance … these modern aberrations are not a symptom of social collapse.
They are the disease.
They are symptoms of weak regulation and they are not invincible.
It’s about time we stood up to these thieves of humanity’s future … and set ourselves on a different path.
Mastery 𝓋 AI
There is no doubt that modern AI is both incomprehensibly impressive … and enormously problematic.
I’m not going to get into the weeds on its moral or technical benefits or whether it can count the ‘r’s in a strawberry.
Instead, let’s talk about its direct impact on you, your mind, your kids …
… and your mastery of thought.
As far back as 2023, there were studies into the damage using things like Google Maps and predictive text keyboards does to your spacial memory or vocabulary, respectively.
Since then, conversational AI has become entirely mainstream — from ChatGPT to Google search results. In our billions we’re asking AI complex questions and accepting the answers with blind faith.
Ignoring the inherent, often deadly accuracy risks for a moment - consider how much work your brain is no-longer doing in order to arrive at that answer.
What’s consistent about these studies is that when people stop using Google Maps or predictive text … their spacial memories and dynamic, personal vocabularies do not re-emerge. The skills are gone forever.
You spend decades building the neural pathways that make you you… that give you your character, your joie de vivre … your mastery of thought.
Assistive technology - your maps app, your phone keyboard or the AI you’ve come to rely on - reformats the pathways of your brain. It undoes decades of learning that you will never get back.
I know we’re all busy ... but if you want to save the very essence of you, before it’s gone forever … turn off AI responses in your search engine and do the work to find the answer.
Do the research. Spend the time. Sweat the effort.
Don’t let haste delete your mastery of who you really are.
Purpose 𝓋 Social Media
I’m old enough and nerdy enough to remember how sociable the internet was before social media came along.
Before 2005, the internet was a throng of blogs, forums and chat rooms where people coalesced around subject-matter interests and a fundamental, inquisitive and altruistic drive to help and learn from each other.
Internet growth was accelerating. Social media did nothing to help that growth… it simply extracted attention from the millions who had built the momentum necessary for the internet’s inevitable mass-adoption.
Unregulated advertising-funded social media changed everything.
Social media is, to the internet, like cigarettes are to fresh air.
Of course, the draw of tobacco smoke is fulfilling to the lungs of the addicted … but the reality is that its harmful to our health and absolutely unnecessary.
Try to think about social media with the same framing Chris Van Tulleken uses for junk food…
Social media neither social nor media - it’s an intentionally addictive industrial product, specifically designed to extract your identity and attention in order to sell you to the highest bidder.
First, we need to understand that the selection of content your feed provides you is, in no way whatsoever, chosen because it will, in any way, benefit you …
… because it’s not. Not. At. All.
Worse - if your maps and keyboards can prune your brain’s spacial awareness and memory, it’s a safe bet that social media will prune your brain’s capacity to maintain a wide social circle … shrinking your awareness of your friends and family … and making your world smaller.
The solution is not as scary or difficult as you might imagine.
You don’t need to quit social media. You can use social media if you must … but you really should try to do two things:
First – if you can … quit the really creepy things like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube where the algorithmic feeds are intentionally toxic … and switch to something like BlueSky where you have full control over the feed algorithm.
Second – REMOVE THE APPS FROM YOUR PHONE and block all notifications.
Quite aside from the fact that every notification you receive is a tracking beacon, even with GPS turned off … when you remove these apps from your phone something remarkable happens.
You will get back all of those small moments … at the bus stop, while the kettle boils, on the loo or when you collapse into bed … and those moments build to reconnect you … to quality sleep, to the people around you …
… and to your purpose in the moment.
Autonomy 𝓋 The News
I hinted at the top of this piece that the insidious penetration of social media into our lives is inextricably linked to the predation of authoritarian-adjacent, usually right-leaning political movements across the West.
The nexus of this movement is the news.
Over the last two decades, news media has been battered from all sides.
Editorial quality has been driven down by the need to accede to the demands of the advertising algorithms. Meanwhile, the political classes increasingly game the system to hide the erosion of civil liberties behind a tsunami of egregiously stupid and banal behaviour.
Meanwhile the American tech conglomerates we all know like Google, Amazon, OpenAI and Meta … and the seditiously evil ones we don’t know so well – Thiel’s Palantir and ClearviewAI, Musk’s Tesla1, Starlink and X and TikTok, now largely under the control of Larry Ellison – are able to consolidate total control over the eyeballs of billions unimpeded by a US government on the brink of collapse into monarchy.
These organisations are not invincible. But time is running out.
While they have always fed on the content the news media produces, they are now beginning to consume the news media itself. With Amazon’s destruction of the Washington Post and Ellison’s purchase of CBS and now CNN, America’s news media is being conglomerated, eroded and silenced.
For some years now I have been playing with various ways to un-fuck the news.
Our goal is simple: give readers a platform that meets their needs to understand the world around them … and in so doing, deliver a sustainable revenue to human journalists who do the vital work of reporting on real-world events.
We are not journalists. Heck, we even use AI to summarise others’ content and reduce our cost to market.
But the motivation for us isn’t money … it’s weaning journalism off its addiction to advertising revenue by giving readers something that’s actually informative, rewarding and elucidating … while distributing whatever the reader is willing to pay to the original journalists and publishers.
Access to balanced, informative social and political news is the absolute cornerstone of a democratic society. Without it – why bother holding elections.
Orwell was right. Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.
If you only read one newspaper … if you rely on TikTok … if you only click the headlines that Google gives you … then it’s all too easy to start believing that two plus two really does equal five.
Nourish exists to help people do their own political maths.
Our nascent platform is built to give readers a broad spectrum of sources, from all over the world. To remind you that there are more than two plus two sides to every story. To remind you that there are more stories going on in the world than the myopic firehose of Trump’s latest nonseplosion.
… to remind us that it is understanding our choices that gives us autonomy.
Humans 𝓋 Tech - Finding Hope
For all the tech that pervades modern society – there is hope. We just need to demand a different approach from our leaders. We need to change the focus.
What if we focused on social growth — not just economic growth? It would force us to reframe every decision in the context of what impact it has on the fabric of society.
A happier, more motivated, more purposeful society would surely become be more economically productive … but reframing our politics around social growth would also, almost certainly improve health and social care, reinvigorate education and increase social cohesion far beyond any blinkered economic policies or a giving you a little help with your electricity bill while taxing you a little more next month.
But none of this changes until we deal with the elephant in the room: tech.
What if we focused our relationship with tech on its regulation, rather than simply bending over and letting it plunder our social capital.
What if we actually set human-friendly rules for the algorithms that drive attention farming, advertising and the erosion of the news media?
What if we recognised that the use of AI is as harmful to the mental fitness of the user as junk food and a lack of exercise is to our physical health.
What if we actually regulated the tech that harms humanity?
In the end, the government works for us. It exists to promote the autonomy, mastery and purpose of its citizens … and regulation is really the only tool it has to fulfil its responsibilities.
What if we actually started taking that responsibility seriously?
Sure, they make cars… but they’re also getting into robots to invade our homes like the dystopian hellhole of i-Robot and unhinged, Hitler-friendly generative AI tools for the creation of CSAM.