Our Digital Disillusionment and Hope
I think it is fair to say that society is becoming increasingly disillusioned with our digital lives. The promise of the internet, open and free has become expensive and devolved into digital feudalistic states. Social media threw us all in a room and someone started a fight. The techno gods took a page from the food industry and figured out how to get us addicted with dopamine. The algorithmic bloodhounds hunt for the manna that will addle our brains.
We are the product and we are the serf. While this may all seem dystopian and doomed, that’s not where we are, nor where we are going. In fact, we may well, like we have many times before throughout history, end up figuring it out. We’re rather clever at that.
We’ve been disillusioned with technology before, going back hundreds of years. In some ways, it may be a normal sociocultural reaction. Then we figure it out in a more pragmatic way.
This is not an article to bring us down, but rather, one that shows there is hope. How exactly it will play out is a guessing game and subject matter for storytellers and Netflix series.
We have in large part, become disillusioned with technologies because few of the promises made in the 20th century, have been delivered. There’s no automated cars, the robots aren’t peeling our grapes for us, flying cars are for YouTube…
