Distrust of technology is difficult, and especially difficult to maintain as a public stance when we value the fruits of technology so highly. One who distrusts is quickly labelled as some sort of primitivist, conservative, intransigent Luddite incapable of accepting inevitable change, like an old man yelling at clouds, soon dead and irrelevant in the face of the massive power of new and hopeful technological opportunity.

A more discerning position against some but not all new technologies is portrayed as a shallow technophobia opposed to new and wonderful advances, rather than the elucidation of a banal but significant point: that some technologies are wonderful while others are potentially terrible.

I am not in a position to refuse technology in favour of a frugal life by Walden pond. I am ill and my survival depends on advances in science that have never before existed; and I live, thanks to medicine that has never before been possible, in the only time in history in which someone like me could possibly survive. Were I born in any other era before the 1990s I would have died at birth or as a young child. By which I mean that it is impossible for me to underestimate just how vital new technology is to my life. Dense, myopic technophobia is not my position.

The far more popular disposition today, well-articulated or not, is a science-fiction technological optimism, a pervasive scientistic faith (not a belief in the basic validity of science and the scientific method, but the sweeping application of a pseudoscientific understanding of science where it does not suit—judging value, morality, politics, economics, etc.), and the idea that technological advancement will eventually, almost naturally, mend our structural and social issues, coupled with amazing hype and the authoritarian tendencies of ultrarich feudalists. This is a horizontal religion, often with indistinct tenets but still tremendously popular and just as lamentable as the vertical faiths promising their salvation. Their hubris is immense, and any tendencies towards messianism should be opposed. To argue against these answers makes one cynical, a pessimist, far too gloomy and popularly called a ‘doomer’, so the opponents of new technology are dismissed on appearances alone. I can renounce popular doomerism, while knowing that naive arrogance, sycophantic parables and inflated optimism are clearly not the only alternatives to morose death.

My aforementioned vulnerability, my special dependence and absolute reliance on particular technologies, means I fear what the world will become more than I believe any decent land will be left for us. Not all technological development is good. Many view ‘technology’ as a monolithic set of useful tools, an advance in aviation considered comparable to one in healthcare or in the media. But no, technology is ideological; its presence and its use shapes how we do things, how we conduct our lives, how we organise society and how we see life itself. Technological progress does not come immediately in hand with any moral progress either. The law and culture are always behind rapid industrial and technological development, meaning: we become disillusioned as much as others eagerly embrace the new toys. Industrial, technological societies, with the imperative of production, can never absolutely overcome the dissatisfaction they produce no matter how they are organised: whether according, superficially, to capitalist or communist rules. Industrial advance creates unrest, not just opportunity, and it is a common feeling that technological progress does not immediately produce a better economy and cultural prosperity. Instead, living standards regress as technology works in uncomfortable congress with questionable political and economic principles. Many technologies are brilliant and indispensable for a good life. Yet we have such a poorly conceived view of how we should live with ever-advancing technologies that are a series of Pandora’s boxes.

Many advances in media technology (television, the internet, and now LLMs) have a few acute advantages and assets I cannot argue against, but after a rough tally of all the pros and cons, have a generally negative, corrosive effect on culture and organised society, atomising and divisive—at least if my badtempered estimation is worth anything. One of my most conservative beliefs, seemingly old-fashioned and square, is the need for a coherent social fabric, with civic and social institutions in good health, general solidarity for all citizens and shared community. Rather than improve this, the most effective new social and informational technologies have been predominantly disruptive, with progenitors actively commending and gloating at their disruptive impact. They have contributed to social decay and civic vandalism, great feelings of disinhibition, confusion, distrust, betrayal, unease, and the worsening idea that what happens socially, politically, industrially, is an opaque and undemocratic process where the ordinary citizen is powerless, insignificant, unable to have a say, and unable to reckon how anything happens at all.

This outweighs, in quantity and quality, whatever virtues otherwise arise and what content I might still find admirable.

Unhealthy reactions to this are unsurprising, with people reacting to a bad situation by making it worse. And so an increasingly detestable political life is unsurprising. These feelings are compounded by how speedily and without delay we continue life. Never has slow and cautious reflection been so unpopular. And so many flashy ways of distantly speaking to each other, with what good they still bring, with all the ways they confine and set the boundaries of social organisation, may appear inferior to now outmoded ways by which we could communicate or arrange our lives; at least for meaningful connections and learning, or a healthy community.

Here is a puerile complaint, or a romantic sentiment: old people are no longer old; no longer do they do what they were supposed to do. They don’t quietly read the newspaper or stand as models of a bygone age. Now they are perpetual children, seated in front of the TV while playing games on their phones. Distracting them from these habits causes a belligerent reaction that used to be stereotypically teenage but has now become a custom of our elders. Real old people are dying out, their once youthful replacements no longer age gracefully but maintain the vices of adolescence. I remember when screens were supposed to give you ‘square eyes’ . . . What difference is there now between the child spending most of the day strained over an iPad and the retiree ineptly slapping an over-tuned Samsung while simultaneously peeking at the TV, making daft Facebook comments on fake pictures? Ageing is yesterday’s fad; who needs it? It is too easy to make a patronising comic: “Phone bad.” Well, yes. Do we really want the old to die?

For all my complaining, I’m flippant; too general, too exaggerated. I’m no Jonathan Haidt—sweeping, simple and absolute. It is easy enough to find exceptions to all the worries about excessive technology. I’m not going to romanticise the old days. Common laments against an impoverished present are founded in cruel temptations, false history, and offer a worse or impossible alternative. Yet it is not as if these objections have no basis, even if too many are crude.

Artificial intelligence is terrible. Its dangerous ecological impact is clear, yet I’m more aware of its consequences for learning. Imagine being able to skip the process of learning how to write, learning how to acquire knowledge, learning how to read, learning how to order your thoughts and make good judgment, relieving yourself of such burdens with the help of a machine you do not understand. This sounds alarming, but that is what so many students now do. They vacate the process of learning, seen as a dull time sink and without value, as if the end product is all that matters. Professors without the time or energy to examine so many texts for sterile artificial involvement produce gormless students illicitly acquiring degrees with no understanding of how they got there—an upgraded version of paying for someone else to cheat your classes for you, and a mode that’s somehow prescribed and supported by our largest and most powerful corporate and government entities. Forget actually reading Freud or Nietzsche, forget real knowledge, forget learning anything, slip it into the software and skip to the next question. Cheating was always possible—now it is incentivised, readily available, and easier than ever.

Universities do not have the time or resources to regulate the growth of AI, and ideas of academically embracing it are quaint and idealistic—we will see instead far more bad news than any novel highlights. Professors can mark AI papers just as they would conventional ones, and for now students shall deservedly receive bad or mediocre grades for being derivative and bullshitting. When LLMs can produce papers on Goethe and La Rochefoucauld that make a passing grade and can go undetected by overworked professors, we shall have all the problems described above. Students pass, but with no real knowledge of any subject, and this is the death of learning. They’ll simply cheat en masse and not care, even delighting in not having to read. And universities, counter-majoritarian institutions in an insidious identity crisis since the 1960s, closer to commercial entities than places of learning or real qualification for work, attacked from outside and committing self-harm daily, won’t mitigate these worries any time soon.

The original Luddites, worried about new automated machinery and woollen mills, have a poor reputation as their name is used as a byword for the narrow-minded fear of technology and change. Yet the Luddites were not morally inferior dolts. Automation upended and destroyed their way of making a living and their way of life, and it is hardly an unfamiliar or unreasonable sentiment to be worried about automation, monopolisation or other practices that leave one without work and damage a culture. The apparent inexorable and fashionable changes via technology are never a monolith, and enough myth and fable, or a basic knowledge of history, can show us the grim cost of our vanity and conceit in allowing them to alter our world unregulated and without care. Doing away with older technology and ways of life so expediently, or callously, notwithstanding all the very bad old ways of life that exist, means when one door opens, another closes. Our new infrastructure is fragile and still regularly susceptible to the elements, ecological disaster, political repression, or economic disorder. A basic power cut throws us into turmoil. Doing away with ways of life and work that should instead become dormant redundancies, fallbacks in case of emergency, neglecting plan B, discarding old forms in favour of new upgrades, means we are lost when the new system inevitably falters—having forgotten how to walk after learning how to run. Technology should be a useful enhancement, an option, not an obligation, and not given our total dependence while controlled by overpaid, egomaniacal oligarchs divorced from everyday life.

Technology may progress, but which sort of technology profits most is motivated by pernicious incentives, where this process, no matter the awesome innovations, occurs with historical regression or with us having to endure a world once enthused with a technocratic confidence now reaping part of what it has sowed. Enough has been written about the intellectually adverse results of information technology. I am thinking of Carl Sagan, Neil Postman and numerous others. My own contribution means little. The awful politics, authoritarian deceits and current democratic decay are not a new future aberration but maybe something more in line with our longer and general history. The world post-1989 may be considered a height of democratic prosperity; a truth that might appear deeply pessimistic. The near future will be worse for the health of our societies, and some fantasise about the magic of technology to end this horror, to bypass muddy human affairs and reach a utopian peak beyond the petty scandals of our politics—as if life under the machine or directed by impersonal algorithms will be glorious and without issue.

History is dramatic. If the time should ever come when a few men were, or believed themselves to be, ‘masters and possessors over social nature’, then perhaps the drama would be over. But the individual would have forfeited his sense of liberty. Would a life subjected to a rational or purposeless organisation still be human?

—Raymond Aron, Progress and Disillusion: The Dialectics of Modern Society

Gaudy technological optimism, and the rambling pseudo-philosophies of rich technophiles, are part of an ideological model, a paradigm, an unsophisticated but persuasive unworldly rearrangement of life, and its prophets should be doubted. If one promises deliverance and salvation, or damnation and catastrophe, it is better to doubt. I don’t care for fantastical visions or quixotic schemes. Avoiding the worst outcome means more than achieving the best, and the prevention of tragedy is worth more than dreams.

Instead of finding solutions, the technological utopians, or at least the cynical providers of our digital world, have been instigators of our current malaise. Their lack of regulation and care as they speed ahead of culture, human agency and the reach of legal systems, causes more harm than what novelty their platforms may bring. Maybe I am too harsh, but the conduct of social media companies is hard to defend. There is certainly pressure from the superego to accept the supposed advancement of civilisation; yet what is deemed best for all is inevitably used as a weapon against us.

Auguste Comte’s positivist utopian project was arguably benevolent yet doomed to fail. Contemporary society still enjoys the flavour of wishful scientism and all-encompassing theories of conduct despite history or reason. Others suggest utopian projects are superficially alluring but inevitably harbour nightmares, and their failure is welcomed, as we should be careful what we wish for . . . Past utopians were 19th-century socialists or rural religious sects who were all rendered impotent by reality. The utopians we should fear today are not futile online conspiracy theorists, useless leftist cranks, or philosophical naval-gazers eager for fantasy, but authoritarian billionaire technophiles (with demagogic right-wing appetites) who have actual influence and power. Their zealous dispositions and puerile commitments will plausibly flatline just like their historical utopian predecessors. Sometimes it is better for all of us that ambitious men fail rather than succeed.

We lose something with every apparent leap forward, and to say so is not mere traditionalism. The ideal future cannot reach its peak by forgetting the past. Civilisation can only advance sustainably, morally and socially, with a measure of prudence and without forgetfulness. And who among our current rulers, or saleable pundits, shows any prudence or fit memory?

Regulation of the internet is inept or inevitably oversteps. My protests are intolerant. I have no clear answer how to manage our overwhelming mess. We cannot return to an idealised past, false and misleading, and the nostalgic will to do so will be unproductive. It is not a sound political strategy to wait for the world to return to how it was. “Normal” won’t return. Our future will not be sublime, and I struggle to hit a hopeful note. If you can forgive me descending into platitudes, the worst people thrive on our hopelessness, and hopelessness is not a good recommendation for our health or polity. Historically we have managed to suffer desperate circumstances with radical hope and perseverance. It might be an impossible request to concentrate on better technologies and neglect the unfavourable ones, but that is about all I might childishly claim. Optimism may be possible, even if it now feels incoherent.