STEVE JOBS (1955-2011) | I think it’s [technology] brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television - but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862) | Men have become the tools of their tools.
Let me start by saying that this post is not intended as a soap-box diatribe…but an invitation. An invitation to take a clear-eyed look at how technologies, from the printing press to the silicon chip, have reshaped what we value, who gains power at the expense of others, and what might be quietly slipping away from our society as a result.
You won’t find solutions paraded as certainties. Instead, you’ll find stories of playwrights, inventors, monks, clocks, and a little experiment with fake headlines that ask a few simple questions worth considering:
Does more information make us wiser?
Who benefits when technological tools become universal?
And what have we stopped noticing while we chase the “next new thing”?
Read on with curiosity and a healthy dose of skepticism. Bring your questions and leave your assumptions at the door.
Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) once remarked that, “All professions are conspiracies against the common folk.” He meant that those who belong to elite trades (e.g., physicians, lawyers, teachers, and scientists) protect their specialized status by creating vocabularies that are largely incomprehensible to the general public. As a teacher who secretly enjoys a little technical gobbledygook now and then, I’m not really offended by this. In fact, I prefer to operate in the open because outsiders asking obvious questions about my work often notice what might otherwise be missed.
So let me start by confessing that I’m a complete outsider when it comes to “tech.” I know as much about programming (possibly less) than the average person. So take what follows as the view of someone who observes technology from the margins. My claim is simple: technologies give…and they also take. They tend to reshuffle what matters in a culture, often without anyone noticing until it’s too late.
Experts love to enumerate technological wins…but fewer pause to name the losses. Apart from exceptions such as Joseph Weizenbaum (1923-2008), Neil Postman (1931-2003), and a few others, most tech evangelists sing its praises while keeping mostly quiet about the costs. Their collective silence feels a lot like a profession protecting its mystique.
Think of technological change as a Faustian bargain. Sometimes the net is positive; sometimes it’s not. The printing press is a classic example. It birthed individualism and modern science, made prose common and poetry rarer — yet it also dissolved medieval communal sensibilities and helped turn religion into a theological battleground. German inventor Johannes Gutenberg (c.1393-1468), who probably expected his printing press to serve the church in Rome, ended up fueling the Reformation instead. The clock, built by Benedictine monks to order prayer, later timed the workday and helped make capitalism possible. Inventions have a way of showing up with intentions that become consequences the inventors never imagined.
Moreover, these consequences aren’t evenly distributed. Every new technology produces winners and losers. Large organizations — militaries, banks, airlines, state tax agencies — have become infinitely more influential with computers. Researchers in physics and other sciences now rely almost completely upon them. But what about steelworkers, bakers, bricklayers, small grocers, mechanics, teachers, or dentists? For many, the arrival of computer’s and the internet has meant increased surveillance, more bureaucratic control, baffling decisions arrived at by inscrutable algorithms, and the reduction of human beings to QR codes.
If this seems a bit alarmist, consider this question: do schools teach children to use computers and the internet better than they teach things that build sound judgment or moral imagination? Junk mail and spam flood our mailboxes and inboxes. Advertising, both retail and political, find increasingly efficient ways to target us. In short: the winners often get more power, while the losers get more control applied to their lives.
When the winners sell technology to everyone else, they point to small conveniences: an app that auto-categorizes your spending and syncs with your bank, a cloud recipe box that generates grocery lists and weekly meal plans, a smart pantry that reminds you what’s low and orders it for you. They promise secure voting from the couch, one-click shopping with same-day delivery, an always-on stream of personalized answers from an AI assistant — and with it the implicit idea that physical neighborhoods, town halls, and the daily work of being present can quietly fade away.
If you’re skeptical, they dazzle you with feats of technology that seem impressive but have marginal relevance to the actual quality of ordinary lives. The result is often persuasion by spectacle: if the masters of a skillset speak with a certain authority, we assume their tools must be wisdom. An assumption that they come to believe as well. This is why certain questions — like whose power grows and whose freedom shrinks — often don’t get asked.
But this is not to suggest that a coordinated conspiracy is taking place. Winners don’t always know what they’re doing. The Benedictine monks who invented the mechanical clock were seeking disciplined prayer, not the synchronization of labor that later birthed factory time. Gutenberg likely imagined one thing and set loose another. Technology guarantees unintended consequences.
Perhaps we should ask ourselves an uncomfortable question: “Do we believe that more information equals better lives?” Neil Postman developed a brilliant experiment to determine how willingly people accept absurd “findings.” Whenever he noticed a colleague without The New York Times, he would tell them to look at page 23 where a Harvard University study reported that eating chocolate eclairs six times a day burns calories because of a unique nutrient called “encomial dioxin.” Sometimes he would vary the experiment and tell one of his colleagues that neurophysiologists in Stuttgart tracked 1,200 people for five years and found jogging lowered intelligence. The response was typically some combination of curiosity, mild disbelief, or “I’ve heard something like that.” But only a few ever dismissed it as impossible.
There’s a lesson that can be found in a line from famed satirist H. L. Mencken (1880-1956): “There is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe it.” George Orwell (1903-1950) likewise suggested our modern credulity resembles medieval faith in that we trust science the same way medievals trusted priests. But I want to offer a different point: we live in a world that, for many, is essentially incomprehensible. We lack a consistent, integrated picture of reality that would cause contradictions to clearly stand out. In such a world, almost nothing seems unbelievable.
A silly example: suppose I told you the chairs you’re sitting on were made from the skin of a Bismarck herring. If an industrial chemist explained — using technical jargon — how it was done, many of us would accept the story without much thought. Absent a reliable framework to judge plausibility, the bizarre and the routine blend together rather convincingly.
Perhaps a better metaphor would be a brand-new deck of cards. Turn over the ace, two, three — you would expect to eventually draw a ten. But what if the deck had been shuffled twenty times? There would be no way to predict the next card. In a world without intellectual order, any card is possible…so nothing surprises us…and nothing can be categorically dismissed.
Contrast that with the medieval worldview, which possessed an internal logic. People generally knew where they came from and where they were going. Their beliefs were coherent; they could deduce consequences from sound principles. It made weird claims feel, if not rational, at least explainable. Today, our picture of the world is fragmented. We don’t know what information matters and we don’t know how to properly filter it.
None of this is new. Gutenberg’s printing press initiated the information age centuries ago. But the flow has intensified. A lot. In America alone we are confronted by some staggering numbers: 420,000 billboards; 5,600 newspapers; 4,637 periodicals; 243 million media streaming subscriptions; 288 million TV sets; 1.5 trillion songs streamed; 1.5 million books published; 6.7 billion photos taken per day; and USPS delivering 59 billion pieces of junk mail every year. Telegraphy, photography, and the silicon chip have amplified the saturation of data until information no longer reliably solves problems. How many “experts” offer contradictory explanations on all sorts of topics?
I am going to suggest that two failures explain why. First, we have lost a coherent sense of self, community, and purpose; consequently, it’s difficult to judge which information is useful. Second, we deliberately built machines that generate information faster than what our cultural immune system can process. We don’t know how to effectively reduce, filter, or use the continuous flood of data. It’s as if we have been caught in a slow-motion information tsunami that threatens to drown out what matters most.
Enter the internet: universal in application, integrated into other machines, and obsessed with information. Through computers we access more data…faster and better organized. Fine. But do more facts make us wiser? Do countries invade one another because of a lack of information? Do children starve because health agencies lack data? Are marriages broken because we misplaced the instruction manual? No. The problems that make life miserable — spiritual emptiness, damaged relationships, hunger, war, racism — are not principally information problems. The internet can’t supply moral frameworks. It cannot choose our questions or tell us what’s worth asking. It cannot teach us how to be virtuous.
This is not an indictment of the internet or computers as objects. They are tools, and tools have natures. Their nature is to multiply information. And when the world conflates information with wisdom, the internet looks like a messiah. Brilliant young technologists build astounding things and believe those things will make us nobler. They might, instead, have become philosophers, teachers, artists, or theologians. Imagine what could be learned if they did.
STEWART BRAND | Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.
Technology gives us Star Wars defenses, artificial intelligence promising self-knowledge, instant global communication promising mutual understanding, and Virtual Reality promising spiritual depth. But history and common sense warn us: the device alone won’t heal the human heart.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was right: “All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) advised, “Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.” Socrates (c.470-399 BC) insisted, “The unexamined life is not worth living”. The prophet Micah (800-701 BC) was encouraged to, “act justly, love grace and walk in purity with your God.”
The old voices aren’t quaint relics of nostalgia; they’re a reliable compass in a world that mistakes data for direction. Before we build another feature or chase the next convenience, ask: who grows freer and who grows smaller when this tool is utilized? Learn to notice what information is doing to your attention, your conversations, your neighborhood — then choose differently.
Read a poem, argue with a friend, sit with a problem you can’t just Google away. Teach your children to judge more than to click. Technology can be brilliant and useful…but it should never become an excuse for neglecting the slow, stubborn work of being human together. As cartoonist Walt Kelly’s character Pogo said with the perfect mix of humor and truth: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” But it doesn’t have to stay that way.
