I think we are. I am also 40 something and in my teenage years, I bought into the idea that tech will change the world for the better. I was fascinated with th

I think we are. I am also 40 something and in my teenage years, I bought into the idea that tech will change the world for the better. I was fascinated with the wisdom of the crowd, having read a pop account of the Sante Fe Institute and complexity theory at 13. I grew up on the idea of the climate crises, global warming, recycling, and solar. Apple fulfilled the vision of Xerox PARC and changed how we interacted with the world; Google was the big tech hero; Amazon proved ecommerce; Facebook … I never really got. There were already many ways people were connecting together into the “global village” on the internet. Since around 2010, I have come to the conclusion that I was wrong about all of it. It isn’t so much that the tech invented after I was 35 was against the natural order of things so much as, revisiting the tech I grew up with and how we got here, and seeing its affects on people, particularly the Zoomers (Gen-Z), this is not the world I envisioned, and yet this is a consequence of the tech we wrought. The biggest thing was that I was wrong about the wisdom of the crowd. What wisdom? It’s the tech amplification of mob mentality. Upvotes got coopted into commercial exploitation, and then eventually, distorted our political discourse. The tensions and divide had been building for a long time, but we built this feedback loop chained into perverse incentives. Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and other Big Tech rode the waves of aggregating consumer demand. Open Source got coopted to serve big commercial interest; Richard Stallman turned out to be right. The smartphone certainly changed how we interacted with the world, and it synergized with a social media designed to enslave people’s attention, and divide people. “Wisdom” of the crowd now comes with us everywhere we go. I won’t even get into solar and recycling. I started getting what MacLuhan is saying, “the medium is the message”, and what he saw first with electrification of a society, or the change in culture with broadcast. Or what people were talking about with the telegraph back when it was invented. The thing that crystallized all of this for me was when I encountered permaculture and realized, there is a very different way of approaching technology. Not necessarily anti-technology, low-tech, or no-tech, but rather, technology’s place to serve a way of life rather than the other way around, bound to three ethical principles: care for earth, care for people, fair share. Many technologies we see now and before, would fail that ethics check. And I think it is possible to develop and build technology differently. The surveillance, the VR, all of that are the unthinking, mindless integration of technology and innovation. Every technology comes with both wonder and horror, and they are leverage for what is in our collective consciousness, both the good, and the bad.