Essay: The False Promise of Technology

As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. Underlying this trend is a single idea: the belief that our existence is understandable through code, and better data will help us build a better world.

Reality is now simulated; synthetic conditions that are generated seem more “real” than the actual experiential act, what cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard called “At the heart of this is the notion that our contemporary experience is devoid of equilibrium. Artificial environments of learning, mobile devices, and interface VR or entertainment systems of communication and visual-sound displays have begun to reshape our perceptions and limbic systems in ways we are yet to grasp intelligibly.

If legibility is contingent upon messages resonating at a particular frequency, then dissent becomes incompatible within the format; deviation cannot be tolerated because of how communities have come to discipline themselves. Public discourse is increasingly mediated by proprietary software systems owned by a handful of major corporations , which run filtering algorithms to determine what information is displayed to users on their ‘feeds’. Far from being neutral and objective, these algorithms are powerful intermediaries that prioritise certain voices over others.

Meanwhile, a thwarted agency under neoliberal atomisation – a fetishisation of the individual detached from society – feeds a source of frustrated volition; a sense where our work is meaningless and elections don’t matter. To seek a way out of self-paralysis and feel animated, we overcompensate with outrage. New technologies incentivise this by offering everyone, at virtually any given moment, a platform to express indignation.

Outrage can be mobilised constructively as the #MeToo movement has shown, identifying and calling out offenders has resulted in moving the cultural needle on matters of sexual assault and harassment.In a period of ascendant ethnocentrisms and authoritarian impulses, a ‘post-truth’ universe has become affixed to our turbulent socio-political landscape.

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