Merriam Webster defines fetish as:
- a: an object (such as a small stone carving of an animal) believed to have magical power to protect or aid its owner.
b: broadly: a material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverence
an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion : prepossession.
c: an object or bodily part whose real or fantasied presence is psychologically necessary for sexual gratification and that is an object of fixation to the extent that it may interfere with complete sexual expression.- fixation.
- a rite or cult of fetish worshippers.
1 a, 1 b, 2, and 3 fit how many people view technology, I call these people techno fetishists. These are futurists, techno “optimists,” and tech bros. They have fetishized technology and some even treat it with religious reverence. Technology is a tool, it can help and it can harm. We have reached the point where we could use our technology to destroy our civilization, maybe even wipe our selves out completely. These techno fetishists have only made the use of technology more harmful, their fetisization of technology has led them to use or to let others use technologies in harmful ways. It is not hyperbole to say that techno fetishists are destroying the world.
Source: NBC News.
Middle: Micro plastics in the ocean.
Source: Industry Weekly.
Bottom: A shore contaminated with plastic trash.
Source: World Bank Group.
Air pollution, water pollution, plastic pollution in the ocean, the health effects of micro plastics, deforestation, desertification, etc, these come from technology. But they don’t have to. Social media has created social division while making a very few very wealthy and powerful, contributing to the growing wealth divide. It didn’t and doesn’t have to though. The world is heating up because of human caused climate change and climate change that will harm us and is harming us. It didn’t have to be this way though. The negative effects of technology comes from how we use it, these negative effects of technology could have been mitigated, some of them could have been prevented. Part of the reason these harms have not been mitigated or prevented has been the techno fetishists. The fetisization of technology has only undermined efforts to deal with the consequences of technology, and those who fetishized technology ignored the warnings of the scientists who told people about these consequences. The repeated failed predictions from the futurists, the techno optimists who ignore the potential harm of advancing technology reducing our abilities to preemptively deal with them, and tech bros have been around long before Silicon Valley (they just didn’t have a name tech bro until the 00s) and have only ever cared about short term financial gains, all have worsened technologies effect on the world.
Futurists are the best people to start with because there is a lot of overlap with techno “optimists” and tech bros. Even when they don’t overlap, techno “optimists” and tech bros have stolen many ideas from futurists while ignoring deeper philosophies they are based on and ignoring the more cynical futurist predictions.
Futurists are the kind of people who will point to Moore’s Law saying “computers will continue to get more powerful indefinitely”. Moore’s Law refers to the number of transistors on a chip, not processioning power. More transistors does usually mean greater possessing power but referring to Moore’s Law in terms of possessing power misses the causal connection between transistors and possessing power. Transistors can only get so small, they are physical things, made of matter. At a certain point it becomes physically impossible to make them smaller. Futurist look at technological trends and technological uses of their time and extrapolate those into the future ignoring physical, practical, and economic limitations, and ignoring the demonstrable historical facts that technological development does not work that way. Technologies develops in an S-curve. A technology starts out expensive and it advances slowly, over time costs come down and the technology advances faster. The advances continues to accelerate until the technology reaches physical, practical, and economic limitations that makes it more and more difficult and expensive to advance the technology. The technology can and often does continue advancing but at a much slower rate.
If you look at science fiction you’ll notice that science fiction often does the same things, extrapolating trends and uses into the future. Science fiction is science fiction though, it can get away with it for the same reason fantasy can get away with magic, fantastical creatures and worlds, they are not real. Futurists are basically science fiction writers and enthusiasts who think their science fiction is a plausible depiction of the future. These science fictions have proven not to be, but that hasn’t stopped them from continuing to create science fictions thinking they are plausible. The fact that we are in the future and it is nothing like what anyone predicted speaks volumes about deep into the “fiction” part of science fiction futurists are.
Trends change. Moore’s law is not a scientific law, it is trend in technology observed by a the engineer and businessmen Gordon Moore. Between 1903 and 1969, a period of 66 years humans went from barely getting off the ground to landing on the Moon. After five missions to the moon, we stopped going. The Concord was the first and only supersonic passenger airliner. It entered service in 1973, it ended service is 2003. The Space Shuttle first launched in in 1981 and it’s last launch was in 2011. Since 2011 US astronauts have been going up in Russian Soyuz rockets which use 1960s technology, then Falcon 9 rockets that while are more advances in terms of computers, materials, and other components, in many way work like rockets from the 1960s and 1970s. There has been advances in flight technology, slow evolutionary advances, not the revolutionary advances of the 80 years after 1903. It’s not just flight and space flight technology, this is how useful and popular technologies advance, it is the S-curve of technological advancement. This doesn’t mean a new technology can’t initiation a new rapid period of development but very few have accurately predicted these new technologies, mostly focusing on science fictions.
Futurists get more wrong than how technology will develop, often technologies are used in ways few predicted. How long have people had the ideas that computers in the future will work they was they do in Star Trek? In Star Trek, from The Next Generation onward, everything was touchscreen and everyone mostly told the computer what to do. It’s a cool idea, the kind that futurists like. We’ve had the technology to have voice control on any internet capable device for well over a decade. How often has it been used? Not often (though there are time when it should be the only interface used like when you are driving). LLM chatbots like ChatGDP will not make people use them more, the problem has not been that the devices that couldn’t talk back, the problem is there are better ways to use these devices. Touchscreen is similar, it works on phones and tablets but most laptops sold today don’t have touchscreen and most desktop monitors are not touchscreen. There are better ways to use a computer than touching a screen. Key boards, mice, and touchpads will be the dominant interface for desktops and laptops because they are just better than touchscreen, touchscreen will continue to be used on handheld devices because it is just better than voice control. Voice control will be used in cars and other places where one’s hands and/or attrition is taken up by something else, and voice control will be what is used in these situation into the future, not the techno fetishist idea of a neural implant. Futurists would never predict the internet or how it is used, they would never predict texting, smart phones, or social media for the same reason they are rarely used in old science fiction. They didn’t not fit the trends, how technology was used at the time, and they wouldn’t have been seen as cool.
Next are the so called “techno optimists,” though “optimist” is not the right word for them as their “optimism” is just toxic positivity. While futurists get so much wrong, many, if not most are not overly optimistic about technology, some are very pessimistic about it. The reality is these toxic techno “optimists” are not optimists, they are utopianists who think technology will solve all of our problems. These utopianists, like singuleratists and tanshumanists (which overlap with them) are very much like an end times religion. They have their prophecies about what is gong to happen, when the prophecies fail, reinterpret and redate. Like all utopianists; Communists, Nazis, Islamists, Fundamentalists, etc, their ideologies are only destructive and only make the world worse. I go so far as to call them an existential threats to humanity as we have reached the point where we can destroy ourselves with our technology.
Source: Physiology & Behavior – Environmental causes of violence
Technologies are tools, they can help us and they can kill us. A hammer can be use to build a house or bludgeon a man to death, a knife can be used to whittle a peace of art, or slit a woman’s throat. Social media can bring people together, forge friendships, give people the freedom to speak out, and allow distant people to keep in contact, it can also be used to divide, turn people against each other, control people, and create violent mobs. Video games can be be a form of art, express ideas, and tell stories that couldn’t be told in any other medium, they can also be addicting, used to distract the populace from the problems in the world, and used to spread propaganda. Technology is a double edged sword, which way it cuts depends on how we use is it. The toxic positivity of “techno optimists” ignores the harm technology can do, and when potential harms are ignored, they inevitably happen.
As much as technology has made the world better (and it has), it has also created new problems, and these problems can’t always be solved with new technology. Global warming, pollution, and environmental destruction can’t be solved with technology alone, we are going to have to make changes to our lives if these problem are to be solved. New technology will help but not nearly enough. The problems and societal divisions social media has created can not be solved by any technology, it can only be solved by cultural changes and media education. Changes in us, in how we use the technology, how media literate we are, and how money is made from it. For the world to get better, we need to change, not have a religious faith that new technology save us.
Next are tech bros, the AI bros, the “AI artists,” the crypto bros, the tech investors, the tech businessmen and the corporate executives. These people don’t understand the technology, they don’t care to, they only see it as a means to make money. These are the FOMO filled people who flocked to crypto, meteverses, and now “AI,” because they want to be on the ground floor of the next big thing. They never stop to think of the social or environmental effects of a new technologies. When they care they’ll tell them selves and others “that the problems will be solved later, we have to develop the technology now” (showing the overlap with techno “optimists”). Ultimately what really matters to them is short term financial gain.
These people don’t look at the long tern social and environmental costs of the of technology they flock to new technologies because of their FOMO, they don’t even look at the short term tern social and environmental costs, many don’t even stop to ask if a new technology will give them gains in the short term, fearing that if they stop to ask they will miss out. Both crypto and “AI” have a huge environmental costs, those environmental costs affect peoples lives and will affect peoples live into the future even of both technologies vanish. The damage has been done, and there is no sign or evidence that crypto and “AI” will ever use less power, in fact they will need more. The worst part is that because tech bros, executives, and investors are so filled with FOMO they will go all in on new technologies even before the new technologies have been shown to be profitable. This happened when the internet was still young, inverters and companies went all in on selling online before anyone figured out how to make selling online profitable, leading to the dot com bubble. We are seeing something similar with “AI” today, companies like OpenAI and Microsoft are loosing money on “AI”, while investors and other companies are throwing money at “AI”. To make the situation worse, “AI” LLMs are already running into limitations. OpenAI is already running into diminishing returns with the data they stole to “train” ChatGDP, and the internet is not big enough to continue making ChatGDP better. Tech bros and scammers are still making money from it though. They make money in the form of salaries, salaries funded by investment, investment that is likely never to get a return. They make money by selling “AI” related products to gullible executives, companies, and people, and many are making money through start up scams.
We are in a world of growing problems, technology is part of the causes for these problems. Techno fetishist are only adding to those problems. We can deal with the problems we have, they are not insurmountable and not as difficult as been presented. The things holding us back are political and cultural, part of that are the techno fetishism. The science fiction ideas of the futurists clouding any meaningful attempt at looking at where technology is going, the techno toxic positivist utopianists pushing for more technology regardless of negative effect of new technologies, and the tech bros who don’t care about the social and environmental costs so long as they make short term profit, or just to not miss out, all of these are making the world worse. They are destroying the world.
Earth in the header came from Wikipedia.
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