How to resist the tech overlords

Big tech has now made its position clear. It is on the far-right. Here's what happens next.

Photo by Yiran Ding on Unsplash

The enemy is in your home. I'm writing this on the instrument of the enemy and you'll read it on his machine. Tech is now in league with the far-right.

There they were, seated on the front row for Donald Trump's inauguration, like a society of dastardly bastards. Elon Musk, a man who seems to diminish in life force the more he grows in power, and now resembles a crumpled tent of human skin. Mark Zuckerberg, who will always look like he's being bullied by his school locker, no matter how much money he makes or how obsessed he becomes by "masculine energy". Jeff Bezoz, a monument to moral ambivalence.

Somewhere along the line, technology went from something hopeful to something threatening. Not so long ago, it was the thing that would cure us, would connect us, ease our burdens. It was about the Arab Spring and Wikipedia and robotics and mRNA vaccines. Then, slowly at first, it became more disturbing. It turned out that the information superhighway led to a Russian bot farm. Now it feels darker. Intrusive. Degrading. Deadening. The product of men with low levels of understanding and high levels of confidence, who consider themselves above everyone else.

The pivotal cultural moment came in 2021, when William Shatner went to space. More than anyone, he represented that older, more idealistic view of technology. Star Trek, among other things, was a manifesto for the view that technology, reason, empathy and diversity are all intimately connected. It presumed, wrongly but not unusually, that only rational people could develop this kind of space-faring technology and that such figures would not fall victim to racist obscurantism.

Shatner spent a few minutes in suborbit on Bezos' Blue Origin capsule. He had a life-changing experience. He saw the lifeless vacuum of space on one side and the vulnerable life-giving basket of Earth on the other. "It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered," he said later.

Down on Earth, he attempted to explain this to Bezos. The Amazon owner looked at him with a face robbed of any notable features, without genuine interest or indeed any meaningful capacity for human connection. He just needed the Star Trek guy for marketing purposes. All this wanky existential shit was beside the point.

Behind him, people were opening champagne and cheering, like they were at a sorority party. Soon enough his dog-sized brain was distracted. He kept looking over his shoulder and smiling. Then he just ignored Shatner and turned away. "Give me a champagne bottle," he said to someone, with the grace you'd expect from someone so wealthy. "Come here. I want one." Then he shook it, sprayed it everywhere, and everyone laughed. Everyone but Shatner, who finally realised that he was not in Star Trek. He was in Idiocracy. And the rest of us are too.

I don't know what Bezos took from those old sci-fi shows. Probably nothing. I don't understand how Musk seems to have read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy without noticing any of its humanity, modesty and gentleness. Hell, a lot of these guys seem to have been watching Second World War movies without understanding which side you're supposed to be supporting, so it's hardly surprising that they've failed to comprehend more subtle fare. All we know is that the dream of technology is now under the control of men who are vain, foolish, self-centred, amoral, desperate for power, and in some cases openly fascistic.

The political fightback against these figures is primarily about regulation. As the legal commentator David Allen Green argued recently, the sudden attraction of figures like Zuckerberg to Trump is fundamentally motivated by fear of legislation. In places like Brazil and China, but especially in Europe, tech companies are suddenly facing regulatory demands which they want desperately to avoid.

People sometimes act as if regulation is impossible. These companies are too international. They're too powerful. The technology is too chaotic. That is false. It's one of the most common fallacious arguments we encounter - that because a solution is necessarily imperfect we should not try it at all. In fact, these firms can be brought under control. Their appeals to Trump demonstrate just how weak they are in the face of European legislation.

There are viable regulatory approaches, even for tech like AI. We can introduce safety features as design properties, operate according to agreed international standards, mandate functioning audits with access rights and adversarial test systems. We can insist that governments hire tech experts on salaries at least approximating private sector wages so that they are not hopelessly outgunned by those they are assessing.

People say that you can't regulate things like AI because you can't keep up with it. In fact, we've long had legislative approaches for this type of scenario. You just deploy a sifting system which assesses new developments and then allocates a particular level of scrutiny depending on their importance. It's what the EU is doing with AI - categorising research and deployment on a risk-based scale, defined by threat to basic infrastructure, public transport, health and welfare and more.

The problem is not that we do not know how to regulate or that we do not have the power to do so. The problem is that they are forming a defensive partnership with a far-right president to prevent regulation. It's a political issue, not a technical one. And political issues can be decided by political action.

The response to what we're seeing is also personal. Tech is the most intimate product in our lives outside of our underwear. It's right there, all the time. The smart speaker can listen. The camera takes photographs of our most cherished moments. The laptop is the sight of our professional endeavours. If anything useful can come of this moment it's that we will think a little more clearly about what it's doing to us.

This week my partner encouraged me to remove Instagram from my phone's home screen. It was obviously prompted by Zuckerberg being a salivating android travesty, but that's not it really. The motive wasn't really political. It's that his nonsense gave us the excuse to think more deeply about the technology we use.

Instagram had started to make me feel empty. Each time I put it down I felt a little more hollowed out. On and on I scrolled. I learned nearly nothing. I never felt fully in control of what I was seeing - it was constantly inserting something I hadn't asked for. When there was something I was interested in, the app went out of its way to stop me being able to click a link and visit it, in case I leave. It felt infantalising and strangely demeaning. And also, why the hell was everyone so attractive? Why were they so goddamn happy? There was something terribly vapid about it all.

I don't want to give it up altogether - I still want a place to put up holiday photos and there's a bloke on there who does really good salsa recipes. But that's OK. You don't need to delete the app. You can simply remove it from the homepage. And doing that is an oddly profound experience.

Once I removed it from the home page, my behaviour changed dramatically. Suddenly, I had to go into the endless list of apps in the background, find it, and then open it. In other words, I had to make an active choice. And it turned out that when that was the case, I very rarely wished to do so. I've literally done it once.

When it was on the home page, I mostly opened the app by habit. I'm working and think I deserve a break. I'm waiting for the tube and think I deserve a distraction. I take out my phone. And then my mind stops participating. It is in fact my thumb which does the thinking. It acts on automatic: to the icon, open it, get lost, wake up ten minutes later feeling a bit empty again.

That moment - the flick of the thumb, the automatic movement - is the moment to seize on. It's the key test of technology. Is it empowering you? Is it giving you control? Is it giving you autonomy? Or is it overwhelming you? Is it making you passive?

One of the most deadening aspects of modern technology is the notion of infinity. Spotify will never stop. Netflix will never end. Once one thing finishes, another is brought up. Sometimes - in the rare moments in which I have watched something meaningful - it will try to make me watch something else as I am still trying to take in what I just watched. That's very revealing. It's as if the very notion of emotional impact is inconceivable, as if its perfect user is this cup-like thing, this human receptacle, who will simply have this cultural slop sprayed all over them. There is no internal life to its idealised viewer. Just a corroded external shell.

More and more, I find myself relieved by endings. When I put on a record on, it ends. When I turn the last page of a book, it's over. When I finish a comic, it's done. That can feel inconvenient, but it is actually a moment of empowerment. You will now decide whether you want to hear the album again, or listen to a different one, or do something else entirely. You are not just lost in this endless conveyor belt of content, which you long ago stopped considering with a critical eye. You will make an active choice about what you want to do. You will be present in that decision.

How much autonomy do I have over what I watch? It feels like I do. After all, I can get all sorts of movies and TV shows instantly through streaming. You just press the button and there it is. But what happens when you veer outside of what they have to offer?

This is not difficult to do. I wanted to watch all the films by Mike Leigh recently. It's not exactly an obscure choice - he's one of Britain's most famous directors. But incredibly, his earlier work is not available. Secrets and Lies, Career Girls and the rest were not on Google video or on Amazon Prime. I'd veered very slightly off the beaten track and found myself in a wasteland. I don't have a DVD player anymore. Like a fool I figured I didn't need one. So that's it: no more options. You literally cannot watch the film.

Streaming gives you convenience, but not freedom. You can watch whatever you like, as long as it's what they want you to watch. Outside those limits, you have no recourse - no video shop to visit, no Ebay option to use. No choice. We actually have less control than we used to, while assuming things are the other way round.

The political and the personal responses to technology are echoes of each other. In both cases, it is about control. Society has the right to decide how technology is used and pass legislation accordingly. People have the right to use technology which respects their choices and does not try to hack them into perpetual empty engagement.

In each case, the tech oligarch class acts to take control from others and hoard it for themselves. If the horror of the last few days teaches us anything, it’s that they need to be challenged on both fronts. It all starts when you delete an app off your home screen.