Oh, the humanity

Part of my summer was spent tearing through the recent works of the brilliant writer Cory Doctorow. He’s as fierce a writer as he is an advocate, and I am jealous of both his turns of phrase and his moral clarity as he turns them.

Anyway, one thing he’s helped me make sense of is the long-brewing cognitive dissonance that comes with having grown up with and loved what the Internet once was and the despair with which being online is so often associated in the present day.

I love the Internet! It can help me find the answer to almost any question. But, also, I hate it because it has become a cesspool of trolling, surveillance, and criming that seems harder and harder to escape.

Here’s one thing Cory often writes about that, again, helps me make sense of it all:

The fact that Bezos needs to piss and also the fact that he commands an army of hundreds of thousands of workers who are prohibited from pissing really supports my hypothesis that billionaires don't really believe that other people are real. If Jeff Bezos believed that when his drivers needed to pee that it felt the same as when he needed to pee, Jeff Bezos would let those drivers pee:

"Needing to pee" is a bedrock of the shared condition of existence itself, extending beyond humans to our "horizontal brothers and sisters" (John Muir's delightful name for the other animals we share this planet with). Anyone who's ever had a dog understands this. I'm not really a dog person, but when I meet a dog that really needs to be let out of the house, my bladder twinges in sympathy. When I contemplate the kidneys and bladders of Bezos's drivers and packers, I get a sharp, persistent ache that starts about an inch below my navel.

I think billionaire solipsism is inevitable. The mere fact of dealing with people as mass statistical abstractions – hundreds of thousands of Amazon workers, billions of social media users and Google searchers – turns the majority of the world's other humans into phantasms, defective bots whose bothaviors are maddeningly non-deterministic and sub-optimal.

Add to that the fact that harvesting billions of dollars requires you to inflict pain on thousands or even millions of those phantasms whose money, privacy and labor you've extracted, and it's easy to see how you'd end up in a world where you can't bear to contemplate the fact that other people's pain is as real as your own. Solipsism is a deadly, conscience-eroding occupational hazard of the rich and powerful. No visitor to Epstein Island could have made the visit if the pain of those young women was as real to them as the pain of their own daughters and friends.

One thing that I don’t think I’d fully grasped that Cory has helped me figure out is just how anti-humanist and anti-human the lords of big tech are, whether that’s the entrenched powers at Meta and Amazon or the more insane-seeming and cultish people in charge at Anthropic and OpenAI. It certainly explains why I know what an NPC is, and also why a bunch of people would continue to build technology they think could destroy humanity (regardless of whether that belief is grounded in reality or not).

What I can say I am focused on building (and marketing) now are digital tools that make digital experiences better without replacing real life. Novel concept, right? This is a lot easier at an event-planning marketplace, to be sure, although it is probably a lot less lucrative.

The powers that be in Silicon Valley have lost the plot, if, indeed, they ever had it to begin with. They have amassed power through the digital revolution, but, in the process, seem to have forgotten that our lives aren’t entirely digital and that they needn’t be. Despite all of the marketing hype that has painted our present reality and dystopian prospective future as inevitable, it does not, in fact, have to be like this.

More than a decade ago, I think, was when I first heard jokes about Internet Fridge. It has, in retrospect, gotten a whole lot less funny. Adding agent swarms that could take down a country’s power grid to said Internet Fridge have that effect.