The Danger Zone: When Societies Struggle to Adapt to Technological Change
I’ve thought a lot lately about how previous generations, during prior periods of major technological change, dealt with being caught between the tectonic plates of past, present, and future.
Most of us assume, I believe, that tomorrow will be much like today. For the most part, that’s true. From one day to the next, change — loosely defined as the inexorable advance of time across the expanse of space — is infinitesimal and imperceptible. It’s only when you gain time’s objectifying distance that you more clearly perceive the enormity of change’s incursions.
We — and by we, I mean all of us who have aged into adults in whatever one wishes to call this particular era — are living through a period of profound technological change. Depending on one’s age, one will feel the effects of change to lesser or greater degrees.
Some of us — discretion prevents me from identifying the dotards — will remember learning how to type on actual typewriters; subscribing and perhaps delivering newspapers; using grimy pay phones when having to make a telephone call; consulting an inexpertly folded map when navigating toward an unfamiliar destination; buying music in the form of vinyl records (the only way you could get music back then); shopping at brick-and-mortar stores, and buying concert tickets at a physical point of purchase rather than through an app or the web. That’s just a sampling of prosaic experiences and artifacts that were rendered obsolete, swept aside by time and technological progress.
We do so much now online, which means that the online experience, considered in aggregate, has a greater influence on how and what we think, how and what we feel, and how we relate to one another in a social context.
One could make a cogent argument that the march of technological progress resounds positively across our economic, political, and social lives. For the most part, that’s probably true, but I am learning from living and thinking as deeply as I can that no historical narrative is that simple. We’re being herded into embracing an uncritical tech-centric optimism, a Panglossian view that technology always delivers that best of all worlds. The hard truth, however, is that eternal ethical vigilance is the personal investment each of us must make to ensure that the automated intelligences that increasingly pervade our world deliver outcomes that are more utopian than dystopian.
From Youthful Interloper to Master of the Universe
When I first entered the technology industry, it was just another industry. Yes, it was where one could find the frisson of the new: the plenitude of opportunity that accompanies innovation, the emotional and intellectual extremes of despair and elation that attend high-risk/high-reward ventures. The tech industry also offered more than its share of eccentricity and non-conformity, invigorating and refreshing to young people who had braced themselves for a stultifying professional life of endless complacency and conformity.
But — and you knew that a qualifying conjunction was coming — technology was also an interloping, irreverent industry; it was immature, unsettled, relatively unsophisticated, and definitely not wealthy enough to earn card-carrying membership in the Masters of the Universe Golf and Country Club, alongside such stalwart industries as oil and gas, automotive, media and entertainment, banking, and insurance. At the country club of industries, the technology industry supported the patrician industries, like a good caddy or a proficient groundskeeper.
In the last few decades, however, the technology industry has outgrown its shy adolescence and developed a swaggering assertiveness, flaunting and wielding its expanding wealth to disrupt, displace, and occasionally bury unwary businesses and industries. The world’s foremost billionaires are increasingly dominated by denizens of the technology industry, which has learned how to manipulate the levers of power and privilege through mechanisms such as lobbying; ownership and control of new media platforms; and savvy, targeted allocations of campaign financing, both to support sympathetic politicians to thwart or topple political candidates that might inhibit tech’s expansionist agenda.
The early technology industry had the character of an affable ingenue, but the mature technology industry — the one we see before us today — has the bearing of a cold-blooded oligarchic plutocracy. Those who have lived through the transmogrification of the technology industry might be inclined to view its progression (or regression, depending on one’s perspective) as emblematic of the Shakespearean dictum regarding the corrupting influence of power. By now, at this relatively late stage of industry maturity, there should be no question about the power and privilege of the technology industry’s biggest players.
Let’s now consider how the societies in which we live have changed as the technology industry has ascended to its gilded throne. We have social media now in place of traditional media, which included print publications, broadcast radio and television, and movies in cinematic theaters. The leaders of social media, most vociferously Elon Musk, would have you believe that what we might term “old media” had no redeeming qualities at all. The old media, we are told, was biased, censored, corrupt, unprincipled. Some of those allegations, in some cases, might be true, but the truth often presents itself in ambiguous shades of gray rather than in simplistic black and white.
In fact, what I have noticed is that the traditional media and the relatively new social-media platforms were and are both used to condition and direct public discourse. They’re also both owned and controlled by corporations and plutocrats. We had giant media conglomerates in the bad old days, and now we have Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
Monopolizing the Digital Soapbox
What’s interesting about Musk is that he uses Twitter/X not so much as a profit-making business, but as an algorithmic platform to condition, reward, and punish various types of public discourse. Two things people get wrong about Musk are that his purchase of Twitter, now X, was a failure, and that he is a proponent of free speech.
To the contrary, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, irrespective of the vast sum he spent to acquire it, has been hugely beneficial to him and his other businesses. As a result of acquiring Twittter, Musk obtained an unprecedented digital soapbox, a digital platform from which to issue his peremptory condemnations and proclamations. He controls a powerful algorithmic engine that decides which messages get amplified and aggressively disseminated, and, conversely, which messages are relegated to digital oblivion.
The practice of algorithmic prioritization, in a social-media construct, amounts to a sophisticated form of censorship, in that the automated amplification and repetition of targeted content artificially creates the impression of consensus and popular appeal. It’s not traditional censorship, in which certain views and opinions were simply denied the light of day and given no airing at all, but it constitutes a hierarchy of permissible expression in which some opinions become demonstrably more equal than others.
I don’t know whether the traditional political spectrum makes sense any more, but whether you’re on the presumed right or the supposed left, or whether you see yourself in the middle or on the fence, you should be concerned about the autocratic control of social-media discourse. It’s an unhealthy development, and I have no doubt that it has contributed to the coarsening of social interaction in our current era. Speaking of which, we have reached a point where social discourse has become so coarsened that it feels as if we are all swaddled in an infuriatingly uncomfortable, suffocating burlap sack. We feel constrained and stifled, even though the digital realm was allegedly intended to propagate knowledge and to open our minds to unimagined new vistas.
A theory that I have been developing — and I suspect it’s already been adumbrated and developed far more effectively by deeper thinkers — is that periods of convulsive technology change, such as the one remaking our world, represent profound paradoxes.
Yes, technology is advancing at a breakneck pace, and, yes, the march of progress, over a long enough stretch of ground, ultimately reaches sunnier climes and clement destinations. Nonetheless, the journey isn’t smooth, it’s fitful. What’s more, technological advances and social progress are often disconnected, with the pace of the latter lagging far behind the former. I posit that our societal DNA is like sandstone, built on past shards and sedimentary layers of lived and learned experience, and that it takes appreciable time for new layers to form as part of our adaptation to technological change.
If I may be frank with you, dear reader, that’s why I believe we’re seeing so much happening in the digital wilds today that seems irrational, illogical, and, well, unhinged. During the last several decades, technological change has been comprehensive and ubiquitous, arriving in successive, unrelenting waves.
Psychologically, socially, economically, and politically, we struggle to adapt. Our adaptation skills, if we may describe them as such, are predicated on what has gone before. Unfortunately, what is happening now is profoundly different from the practical adaptations that we have accrued from experience. Simply put, we have yet to develop the psychological and social affinities and dispositions that will allow us to adjust properly to our new technological landscape.
I see an irony in the term “social media,” since it superficially denotes “websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking” Anybody who has spent time on the most popular social-media websites can attest that the dictionary definition of the term only partly describes these locales.
While we acknowledge that the sites host content creation and content sharing, they also harbor raging pools of malice and vitriol. One might be forgiven for thinking that the destination antisocial media would seem more apt than social media. Meanwhile, we discover that literacy skills in nearly all age groups are declining, that many young people have neither the time nor the inclination to read books, and that many of us are ready to throw in the cerebral towel and abdicate to AI agents many tasks involving communication and cognition.
Disaster Averted?
If our literacy and analytical skills are already declining, then where will find ourselves in 10 or 20 years, as automated intelligence assumes a greater presence in our personal and professional lives? I don’t know, but we can’t simply trust that AI-based intelligent agents will always act in our interests. They are programmed to make money, after all, and as any street-corner drug dealer or pharmaceutical-industry executive will tell you, at least in their candid moments, the cultivation of customer dependence and addiction is a lucrative business.
The pernicious aspects of the technological revolution, by the way, are not technology’s fault. Technologies, whether we speak of James Hargreaves’ spinning jenny in 1770 or the first fully functional form of artificial general intelligence, which might emerge sooner than we think, are neutral and inanimate. As such, they can be used for a multiplicity of purposes. The guilty party, if one can be identified, is not the malleable, inert technology, but the human actor who use it either insouciantly, indiscriminately, malevolently, or thoughtlessly. The culpable parties, as always, are the people who act with volition, not the technology, which is no more than a tool. Accordingly, the people who control, own, and aggressively propagate the technology must accept responsibility for any dereliction of duty that occurs on their watch.
Since I launched this forum nearly 18 months ago, I have been mustering the confidence to say what needs to be said. I want to be an honest voice, if not an earnest one. (I think a sense of humor is a great asset, and though I concede I haven’t given you much reason for mirthful laughter today, I hope my sense of fun and enthusiasm comes through). We need to think about what we’re doing and where we’re heading before we unthinkingly reach a destination that was never on our preferred itinerary.
I’m haunted by thoughts of the past — not my past, but the past of our forebears and ancestors. How many sane and rational people, during critical junctures in history, kept their counsel and held their tongues even when they felt the world around them lurching toward the abyss? How many decent and good people, in the years before the bloody and horrific pogroms and revolutions in world history, suppressed their concerns and fears and failed to sound the alarm? How many withdrew when they might have stepped forward to warn of dangers ahead?
As we enter 2025, I feel a sense of foreboding about what the future holds. I suspect I’m not alone in having these misgivings. If we all do our part, each of us in his or her own way, I think we can make things better rather than worse. But we shouldn’t assume that the future will take care of itself, or that the established order, however you wish to define it, will make selfless decisions on our behalf.
I hope you take what I’ve written here in the benign spirit in which it was offered. I’m not predicting disaster, but simply trying to avoid it.