So There's This Thing Called Technological Determinism

Does technology shape society or do our cultural, political, economic values determine how we use technology? Will AI, robotics change humanity?

Does technology shape society or do our cultural, political, and economic values determine how we use technology?

Will AI, robotics, and other emerging technologies such as wearable and implantable devices change humanity beyond recognition?

Did DARPA develop the Internet beyond its humble beginnings knowing that data collection, mass media control and the creation of a hivemind would allow for the rise of a technocratic dystopian landscape?

Or did it all happen by chance?

Will laws be passed to curtail the impact of technology (if this is even possible) in an effort to always keep humans in the decision-making loop?

Lets get into the weeds...

Technological determinism seeks to show technical developments, media, or technology as a whole, as the key mover in history and social change. It is a theory subscribed to by "hyper-globalists" who claim that as a consequence of the wide availability of technology, accelerated globalization is inevitable. Therefore, technological development and innovation become the principal motor of social, economic or political change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism

Notice that all the criticism of the theory is coming from social 'scientists' and other left-leaning academics. Of course it is. Their only reason for being is to put forth the idea that everything in society is controllable, especially when control comes in the form of top-down governmental and institutional power.

Technology, it's inventors, and the people that use it every single day don't care about the opinions of academics and the idea that technology can be controlled by passing laws and even outright banning it.

Technology and the ways in which humans are using it are following fundamental drives that can be mapped onto preexisting patterns already very well understood in the natural world.

For example, neuromorphic computing takes inspiration from the human brain.

Human users of smartphones are acting as nodes in a global network of artificial neurons and synapses.

How is this not a perfect example of technology shaping our lives and habits?

Have we banned the use of computers and smartphones?

Did we ban TV watching when it was the only screen available for more than fifty years?

Have we made driving cars illegal because their use is responsible for a large number of deaths and injured every year?

No, I didn't think so.

The argument that societal decision-makers pick and choose how technologies are invented and used is a false one even though the self-appointed decision-makers still believe this and can sometimes win short-lived battles in their favor by trying to restrict or redirect the flow of emergent technologies that they, more often than not, barely understand.

A perfect example is the extremely poor handling of legislation in favor of slapping a cookie notice on every single website instead of allowing the engineers involved to come up with a tech solution which was to add the necessary changes to the most popular browsers and educate users on how to set their preferences.

Bureaucratic solutions are clunky and completely unnecessary most of the time. It is simply a case of bureaucrats making themselves look important and this alone demonstrates where the real changes need to be made.

For now, people can somewhat choose to participate or not in the recreational use of technology (not so much in the workplace) but we're all fully aware of the coercive and addictive aspects of smartphone use and the multitude of social media apps that draw users into their virtual second life.

What we can hopefully agree on is that the introduction of each technology does usually transform the habits of the exposed population whether these effects were the desired outcome of government lab experiments or simply the emergent properties of inspired invention and human creativity.

Detrimental effects or teething problems?

A fair criticism of this technologically determined activity would be that people, especially the younger generation, now spend most of their waking hours staring at screens either for work or leisure.

TVs brought families together around a popular show (bonding) but also turned millions into couch potatoes.

Book reading and long form writing appear to be giving way to social media, YouTube, podcasts and gaming in terms of how much time is dedicated to each pursuit, but I'm not sure these claims really add up when one takes into account that more individuals worldwide are reading more books of all kinds and more writers are writing and publishing their work than ever before.

The real issue that has risen up as a result of ubiquitous information technologies is that many users have had to make a choice between one pursuit or another because there are simply not enough hours in the day and many of these pursuits are capable of capturing our attention for a large number of these hours.

With that in mind, we can break down the pros and cons of each technology and even the way they combine and reinforce each other to maximize their influence on society at large.

Every new technology builds on everything that went before, and while efforts are made to clean up our act as technologies mature, the overall growth outcome has been to saturate the entire world with every single technological advance that earned its place as a staple of human needs and wants.

The overwhelming impact of pollution, mining, and infrastructure on our environment has not stopped billions of people from ordering products from China and receiving them via diesel-powered transportation technologies only for most of the waste to end up in landfills.

These emergent behaviors are determined by the availability of the technologies involved.

For example, I own a smartphone, a laptop and a desktop PC. Having access to these tools shapes the kind of activities I choose to pursue.

If I only had access to a plow then I would be limited to planting and growing vegetables, and if the need arose, maybe melt the plow down to craft a sword.

Every time throughout history that new useful tools and technologies become available they are adopted and copied and improved upon until they are accepted as a routine component of everyday life.

At that point it becomes increasingly difficult for users to backtrack and return to previous iterations of these tools and techniques because to do so would require some form of social retraction.

Dropping out, unplugging, going off-grid, was never easy.

Conformity is a powerful drug.

And when everyone around you is plugged into blogging, social media, online banking, gaming, fast travel, instant messaging, screens and more screens, it becomes unthinkable to let go, to go your own way, to establish your own rules.

The peer pressure has always been there.

It's just that now it's like a monkey on your back that never lets go.

And the long term effects of becoming a digital species are coming into view even though the process is still in its infancy.

Given more time, users will either adapt in even more bizarre ways (in the eyes of traditionalists) or find themselves frozen in a technologically induced state of apathy brought on by a deep-rooted and unshakable sense of existential boredom.

That's your internal rudder self-correcting.

It doesn't mean that you will consequently start a crusade to reject all obnoxious tech from your life, but it may be the beginning of a long process of reassessing what truly matters to you.

Many people go fishing after this.

Even more people start a homestead.

Digital tech is messing with our heads.

Dopamine manipulation and abuse plays a large part in that.

The ones that have had enough and are able to cut back on their digital lives are doing so with gusto.

The question is whether the techno-authoritarians will leave the drop-outs alone or make it their business to rope them back into the system at all cost.

Stragglers make authoritarians look bad.

Just look at how many resisted the mandates during Operation COVID.

And how many more will resist when further attempts to constrict our freedoms are enacted in the name of keeping us safe.

Do these tyrants really care about us that much?

Will they make use of all the available force-multiplying technologies — robotics, AI, EMF crowd-control weapons, poisons, lockdowns, digital ID checkpoints, forced vaccination, drones, and the usual propaganda devices?

To some extent, it's clear that sufficient numbers of people will not fall prey to these tactics ever again and would be willing to stand up to any and all methods mentioned above.

When the penny drops and users finally realize that they are little more than hamsters turning the wheels of industry as they nurse their job-related mental and physical health issues, we may see more and more of these disgruntled worker units identify as rebels, dissidents, counter culture neo-hippies, and even neo-luddites.

And the number one reason in recent times that may activate this response is the gradual awakening to the truth surrounding Operation COVID — the largest act of state and corporate terrorism the world has ever seen.

Vaccines are also considered a technology

Ever since they were artificially validated through sleight of hand, vaccines have been vaunted as one of the greatest inventions in human history.

This false technological and healthcare paradigm is starting to crumble. However, for the last hundred years the vaccine schedule for all age groups became a dominant and deterministic factor in the life of almost every human being.

And Operation COVID opened the floodgates for totalitarian measures such as vaccine passports that attempted to rewrite the rules of access to all areas of life across all known activities.

Work, travel, concerts, sports games, shopping centers, healthcare, just being able to walk around in public all fell prey to the New Normal.

Contact tracing experiments were made possible because every citizen is now expected to carry a smartphone with them everywhere they go.

And if they don't succumb to this practice they're practically cancelled from life.

That said, I sense a strong cultural rejection towards smartphones among those who have correctly identified these devices as agents of control, but these same people generally accept all other previous technological developments that led to the creation of smartphones.

Moderna claimed that their vaccine product was a platform, a scaffold, on which to build further additive elements in the form of updates (boosters) mimicking an operating system of sorts that improves over time.

What is truly extraordinary is that all of the pharmaceutical giants, whether Moderna, Pfizer, Bayer, Johnson and Johnson, or Merck probably know that their biotech vaccines are completely and utterly unnecessary and toxic.

This particular strain of technology has taken on a life of its own, but is entirely based on delusion and scientific and medical malpractice.

This is one so-called technology that the world would be better off without.

The thing is that when you start to point the finger at tech that should never have been invented you start to uncover many other commonly used technologies that share a similar trajectory and could just as easily be tossed into the trash can of history.

Energy flows or everything goes

Technology is additive. For example, energy provision has not changed over the years. We have simply added more sources on top of legacy systems. We still burn wood. It's just called a renewable now. Or Biomass. And we burn more fossil fuel product than ever. The burning was simply shunted a little to the right on the world map. Asia does all the burning now while the West gloats about their reduced carbon footprints and 'clean' cities.

Renewables and all the other fanciful boondoggles invented to see us through the end of this cycle sit atop a mountain of diesel and gasoline. About a 100 million of these barrels are vaporized per day in the relentless drive to keep the economy growing. At some point the cost of extraction will be more than a barrel of oil is worth.

Economic determinism

Wealth and easy access to resources changes our lifestyles, our goals and our perception of the world around us.

Scarcity and poverty instill a desire for more. More food, more comfort, more security, more stability, more wealth.

Sanitation solves health problems and improves the environment in which citizens choose to live and work.

Centralized farming with industrial machinery means citizens can dedicate their work hours to well-paid jobs in the city to the point where many urbanites think that food just magically appears in the supermarket.

Wealth generation and wage stability allow for access to communications products and the Internet and this has grown into a significant monthly expense on top of all the other monthly bills that citizens across all demographics are expected to keep up with or be considered poor.

Transportation, both local and international, transformed the world into an open market. Globalization is made possible by thousands of container ships trundling back and forth between the largest ports in every country. Commercial aviation opened the floodgates for unsustainable levels of tourism that is predictably causing serious issues at many of the world's most attractive destinations. The Taj Mahal or the Grand Canyon 'ain't all that' when you have to wait in a queue all day to take a selfie and quickly move along to make space for the next in line.

People don't even experience events with their own eyes anymore. A mass of people at a concert will spend the entire time (and entry fee) on recording the event, smartphone held high so they can watch it all later or post clips on their favorite social media.

Is this technological determinism?

Is this technological progress?

Are we solving problems or are we creating new ones by continuously adding to what has already been invented?

Have we created a monster that simply doesn't know when to stop?

Why are we throwing resources and capital at building AI data centers?

Do these investors truly believe that we'll all be swimming in AI utopias if we just crack the secret sauce to AGI?

Do they care that this would more than likely create a dystopia in which the inhabitants would gradually lose their humanity (whatever that means these days) and be reduced to human/machine hybrid automatons that may or may not even be required if robotics and AI continue along their current path?

Maybe they're happy to fund any old 'topia as long as the dollar signs keep pinging in their LSD micro-dosed brains every five seconds.

And trust me I'm not dumping on the last hundred years of unfettered, oil-backed, capitalist, materialist, feasting on the resource bank easy pickings.

But that drunken festival, that unrestricted consumer orgy has come to it's natural end.

How could it not?

It would be insane to think that these levels of consumption could continue forever in some kind of endless dreamlike existence where the laws of physics simply do not exist.

Because the laws of physics, the laws of nature, of economics, of technological determinism, of efficiency (Jevon's paradox states that the more efficient a system becomes the more you end up making and needing) will not sit idly by and allow you to break them.

At a deeper level we can identify these societal tensions and cycles as natural catalysts for change and if there's one thing that nature does really well it is to adapt and change to new situations that would not, at first glance, appear logical, even feasible, and yet here we are.

At some point, humans will hit a wall, and they'll be able to process what's happening unlike the other organisms that didn't have a clue. That said, some humans will remain in a state of denial even when the Fat Lady is belting out her final tune and the scenery is collapsing all around her.

So it's time to face the music my fellow citizen tax-payers, consumers, users, customers, high achievers, layabouts, drop-outs or whatever label you happen to be wearing right now.

Sooner or later, no matter how many tricks you apply, the system will comes to its natural end allowing for green shoots to emerge.

This has always been the way.

This is natures algorithm.

For now, the hype cycle continues and as predicted takes the occasional nose dive but, in general, it still looks like a fairly safe bet that AI will be riding atop the world in the years to come.

I would suggest military attention and redirection and investment is going to escalate like nothing we've ever seen with a mad rush to grab all the necessary ingredients with which to bake the AI cake.

A slew of nation states and start ups will get in on the act. Relatively small nations can choose to become the next silicon valley if they play their cards right, if they know how to attract the worlds best AI boffins. Why should Taiwan get all the fun?

And if these countries and start ups join hands and combine their efforts, especially across Asia and the BRICS+ group, then these technologies can be maximized and linked together to produce a tightly-nit, distributed network of difficult-to-disrupt supply chains with intensified technology sharing efforts following a code of cooperation rather than destructive competition.

What is the overarching goal of the humanity/technology partnership?

Progress.

But this does not necessarily equate to increased happiness. Many people are coming to the conclusion that modern life may bring some material wealth and temporary satisfaction with one's lot, but overall, if one could choose a simpler lifestyle, usually in a natural setting among family and friends where basic needs are met, satisfaction and happiness are greatly increased.

Of course, this is not the mindset of every human. Inventors and artists are restless types and will always feel the need to tinker and transform the world around them. It is this impulse that leads to greater and greater feats of engineering reaching dizzying heights.

Daedalus and Icarus dreamed of freedom, but were unable to contain their hubris. Their story ends in tragedy, regret, pain, suffering and sorrow.

The alleged invention and widespread availability of nuclear weapons has shaped the international landscape since WW2 inspiring the narration behind popular (propaganda) movies such as Oppenheimer.

Are the inside club attempting to shape opinion again?

And thereby shape the very nature of our existence through the use of fear?

While simultaneously driving a relentless campaign of future tech Hopium into the deepest recesses of our grey matter so that a state of obedient paralysis is induced in the victim?

Maybe so.

And the victims are not resisting. The Normies are barely aware that anything is happening at all, that they are part of the greatest experiment ever run, that they are becoming cyborgs, that they are turning into something beyond human.

Normalcy bias

Even well-adjusted lab animals are known to rebel and turn on their handlers if something triggers their genetic memory, their instinct for freedom.

Not so with the majority of urban humans. They have been completely stripped of any testicular fortitude and the natural testosterone response to incarceration and abuse.

And yes, I'm referring mainly to the men that are increasingly satisfied with easy access to booze, sports media, video games and porn.

They have become neutered by the technological landscape. And the current trend leads to even more excess with visions of technotopia that threaten to turn every man-child into a gibbering, toy-worshiping mind-slave.

If we're not there already.

There's plenty of evidence that we are.

And the women are not far behind, neutered in other ways, each according to their own flavor, their own delusion, with hyper-feminization leading the way, leaving behind the feisty, dignified, spirited females of old that could run a farm and run you off the farm if need be.

That's not to say that some of these people are not still around. Of course they are. They're simply caught up in the grind just like everyone else because that's what the game has become.

And that's why many of these types, the ones that still have some instinct for the natural, the organic, the traditional, the healthy, life-supporting ways of old that maybe should never have gone away, are attempting to get back to some of that.

It's a revival.

Of sorts.

Usually authentic.

Sometimes a little bit forced and pretentious.

But, unfortunately, these types are usually ridiculously unaware of the forces at work that will scupper even the best efforts in this direction.

These forces are known to some. Very few in fact. And that's mostly because people in general (quite rightly) refuse to look into the abyss.

In the case of Technological Determinism and the panorama that should be clear to everyone by now, we are witnessing the transmutation of the human species into something other than human, an extrapolated variant of the human experience, so much so that it may as well be an alien form of life.

And throughout the process of witnessing this transformation I have to wonder if anyone really cares. I have to suggest that maybe the victim's brains have already been flipped to the new paradigm without anyone even noticing. They have become so well-adjusted to the new farm that they are not even able to react to what is being done to them. It's as if they've been injected with a paralyzing venom and sit waiting to have their entrails sucked out of them by an enormous black spider.

And if the plug gets pulled on the Great Thrust Forward then boy, oh boy, is that going to cause an almighty pile up on the freeway. Humanity's dreams will be dashed and all these urban wannabe space cadets will be wondering about aimlessly without a clue about how to actually survive. The lack of technology and electricity and liquid fuels will very quickly redetermine how lives are lived and who gets to survive and who doesn't.

Okay, that's all folks!

Tune in next week for more tales of mirth and joy!

Until then... keep building those zombie traps.

And unplug the damned tech once in a while.

Just be.

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