Opinion: Remember when we believed in Tech for Good?

There was an idea I used to hold onto fiercely: Techno-utopianism. 

Put simply, it’s the belief that through advancing technology we could advance humanity, leading us as a species to our fullest potential. Soon enough, we would be living in a sci-fi world, zipping through the stars, devoted to great pursuits like advancing knowledge, curing all diseases and extending human life, using replicators to generate meals, and hanging out in the holodeck.

Well, it turns out that we are actually living in a sci-fi world now. Except that it’s closer to a cyberpunk dystopia. As has been predicted in so much science fiction, we have wars being fought with drones, multinational corporations that are more powerful than governments, mass surveillance states, information ecosystems broken by disinformation, and damn I can’t open any social media feed without being bombarded with AI slop. Perhaps one encouraging data point is Meta giving up on the metaverse. 

I think we can pinpoint specific points for disillusionment. 

I personally felt a turn in the run-up to the 2016 elections when my feeds and FB groups suddenly became so much more toxic. Another turn was Instagram suddenly was filled with ads and I wasn’t seeing my friends anymore. A last top of mind example is when journalism outlets were all doing a “pivot to video” and we all seemed to be beholden to the demands of social media metrics. 

I’m assuming I can’t be the only one who remembers there was a golden moment when we believed that technology was going to be a transformative force that would bring us into a golden future. 

Back in my day

I suppose I sound like an old man yelling at clouds sometimes when I talk to young people and share with them how tech used to feel like an amazing thing back in my day and when I was their age. 

I’m old enough that when I was in college I would write my papers long hand, then have to rent a computer and pay for printing. I felt the magic of dial-up, those squeals and beeps that signaled connecting to a much larger world. 

I got to experience when suddenly laptops became affordable enough for them to be a regular thing in schools. And sometimes I don’t know how to express to them the magic of what the smartphone is now, if only because it is so ubiquitous that we take them for granted. Each of these devices and the technological developments underlying them made me feel like we were moving toward something meaningfully better. 

When you look at the discourse of the time, it also gave us reason to be hopeful. The rise of blogging was a “democratization” that gave so many aspiring writers a channel for expression. 

Social networks rose up to allow people to connect and find their communities. And they even served as places where you could organize for social change; lest we forget Facebook was a key tool in empowering the Arab Spring, and for a very long time (at least in internet years) Twitter was a reliable place for discussion and new ideas.  

The Resistance

But now I can’t help but look at how tech that was meant for communication can be flipped and used to polarize and stifle dissent. Weren’t we promised that AI would help to cure cancer and solve other big problems? And instead we are looking at how AI is being used to bomb schools and surveil populaces. 

I think I have to let go of the idea of Techno-Utopianism. My optimism for this movement was, in hindsight, naivete. I believed that tech would just make people better, and with better tech, people would do better things.

The same people selling us music subscriptions are also funding military projects. The same people making AI that will make our identities more insecure in the digital world are the same who are trying to sell us authentication solutions. The people entrusted with protecting our information ecosystem from trolls are the ones who are benefiting from troll and bot behavior flooding our feeds. 

In the same way that in science fiction, there’s always a resistance, maybe it’s time for us to build up and support resistance groups that will help us make tech for good again. Now we know what the game is and we won’t get played.