A Reading Year That Left Me Worried
As I’ve started to dig into a year of reading I see a few big themes emerging.
First, we’ve lost access to truth. From politicians lying then not paying any consequences for their falsehoods, to AI telling us to eat rocks for digestion, we have lost truth. Probably worse though, is that many people aren’t even looking for truth. This falls directly into the hands of the elite class that want us to delegate our thinking to central authorities because when something is concentrated to a few big players it’s easier to control. Just corrupt those few big players and you’ve corrupted everything.
Tying closely to this is the lack of competition in a supposed free market economy. We truly only have a few big companies that control vast swaths of our lives. Many of us interact with family almost exclusively through Facebook, which gives it leverage over our lives. In Canada, Meta used that leverage to remove news from feeds instead of sharing some revenue with Canadian news sites. The end result of that is I had to spend a bunch of time scrounging around to share a public meeting about active transport with the local cycling club, which only has a presence as a Facebook group. Meta doesn’t provide the service people signed up for, and in fact costs them personally as they lose time navigating its interface which isn’t primed for user interaction but keeping you on the page as long as possible.
The third big issue, which is a result of many of the actions of those big tech companies just mentioned, is that we don’t have control over our attention. We’re permanently Odysseus, hearing the call of distraction and having to fight1 it so that we can direct our attention to the places it’s most valuable. Because we have a lack of competition, and adversarial interoperability2, has been outlawed via the DMCA, tech companies like Meta and Apple can steal our attention from us and we end up paying for the privilege with no workaround possible under the law.
Finally, Western society has infected much of the world in the myth of the self-made man which is an extension of Social Darwinism a long ago debunked economic theory. Social Darwinism would have us believe that those who are successful got there because of their genetic makeup and those genetics should get to continue while people that are living in scarcity deserve it due to the lack of ambition in their genes. We see former democratic leaders use the same tactics as autocrats3, flooding the market with lies so that regular people give up and go with the flow as their rights are eroded.
Looking back at my non-fiction reading I feel a bit depressed at the state of the world around us. For many it’s all going to hell in a handbasket. Democratic nations are walking hand in hand with autocrats. Kleptocracy is running rampant. Big Tech companies looked at the vision of the future in books like Ready Player One and don’t cringe at the idea of finding the maximal number of ads before a user has a seizure, they are embracing the techno-dystopian future and fighting to be there first.
That doesn’t mean I think we’re helpless though. Next week I’ll talk a bit about what we can do to move the world towards a place that will be worth living in.
The Sirens’ Call Pg 4 ↩︎Enshittification Pg 62 ↩︎See Autocracy Inc for a long look at this phenomenon ↩︎#DMCA #enshittification #facebook #meta #truth