The Luddite

Americans are, by most measures, miserable. A typical day for many Americans goes as follows: they wake up, get in a car that's one payment from being repossessed; they drive their kids to the only daycare they can afford 25 minutes out of their way; spend most of their day in a soul-sucking job in a cubicle. Then, they come home to a house whose mortgage payments they can barely make (if they're lucky enough to own instead of rent); try to feed their kids and put them to bed, and finally settle down to watch TV until they fall asleep.

This is a very stressful life, yet from a physical point of view, it is exceedingly comfortable. One might even call it convenient. The technological progress of the last century means that we rarely have to leave the cushioned seats of our climate-controlled offices, homes, and cars. We all recognize how maddening sitting in traffic is, but our physical experience does not reflect that.

In fact, when looked at from a purely physical (and admittedly oversimplified) point of view, most of the things we do in our lives have very few meaningful consequences. Those pointless meetings we attend all day with strict deadlines for forms and proposals might stress us out, but they are, like I said, pointless. We're constantly stressed, almost to a breaking point, in a way that's in tension with our physically comfortable and sentient existence. All these stressors seem artificial and yet no less real.

I propose that this tension fundamentally affects how Americans see and interpret the world. We struggle to understand the consequences of our actions. This is partly why, when asked about politics, Americans say obviously absurd things like "I don't care about politics; I just want to be able to afford going to the doctor." It might also help explain why so many people fall for Trump. If you don't understand consequences, suddenly, he's a lot more appealing — who doesn't love a troll? It's really fun to watch trolls troll people.

Our lives have trained us not to understand the very concept of a consequence, and therefore, by extension, the consequences of political action. In this mode of experiencing the world, the only way politics actually affects us is through our emotional investment. Movements fail or candidates lose, and we are left feeling dumb, vulnerable, and embarrassed for having been so foolish as to believe in anything. Or, in the case of Trump, he actually wins an election, leaving his supporters with the elation of victory as most of their material lives continue as before.

I recognize I'm a little out of my element here. The entirety of the social consequences of this tension is well outside the scope of this blog. Maybe they are profound, maybe not. However, I hope to argue that the tech industry is exacerbating the rift between our material existence and our observed reality. In turn, our ability to judge Progress™ in our society has been corrupted by this rift. When we do try to affect our material reality in some way, we are increasingly doing so through tech platforms specifically engineered to tap into those deep emotions described above, thus giving them an opening to drive that wedge between our experienced reality and the material plane. I propose we name this state of being “postconsequentialism."⁰

The inspiration for this post comes from an obscure reddit comment on the subreddit /r/ArchitecturalRevival. Normally, the subreddit is just pictures of buildings in different traditional architectural styles, though it does occasionally attract that strange sort of western chauvinist weirdo who insists on exclusively referring to Istanbul as “Constantinople." Normally, posts receive at most a handful of comments, limited to discussions of column placement or architectural preservation.

In this case, the post was titled “Imagine living in a time where you thought things were getting better." As of writing this, 2 days after the post, it has over 150 comments, most of which are debating the concept of Progress™. Some examples (in their entirety, including typos):

That last comment in particular caught my attention. The commenter argues that today is a wonderful time to be alive, as evidenced by the progress in our transportation technologies. We have gone from trains — a form of travel limited to rails between laboriously predetermined earthly destinations — to rockets capable of taking humanity to the moon and beyond.

In some ways, this is obviously true, yet there is also one fundamental difference between steam trains and rockets to the moon — how we experience them. Trains are experienced by people from all across the socioeconomic spectrum in their physical form. Human beings put their physical bodies into train cars, experiencing the effect of being physically moved in the physical world. Rockets, on the other hand, are experienced virtually by all but a select few for the foreseeable future.¹

In the story of progress proposed by the commenter, there is a second, hidden progress — one that lets us experience more and more things virtually. Were it not for TV, the vast majority of people would not have experienced the moon landing as viscerally as they did. Since then, our virtual experience capabilities have progressed immensely. We no longer have to go places to feel like we experienced them. Likewise, it is becoming increasingly easy to feel that other people's recorded experiences are emotionally our own.

This expansion of experience simulation leads to a contradiction when we try to collapse the concept of progress into a single dimension. It is probably reasonable to argue that rockets are more advanced than trains, but at the same time, increasingly fewer Americans have access to trains, while virtually none of us will ever access a rocket. In fact, the transportation infrastructure of our country is crumbling. Access to public transit is falling, and the census shows that American commute times are increasing. Perhaps there is some sort of progress algebra we can do here — how many minutes of average extra commute time is worth one moon trip? — but I think it is more likely that there is a problem with this concept of Progress™.

I'd argue that much of the progress of the last couple decades was precisely in these communication and simulation technologies — basically, the internet. These are monumental human achievements that I do not mean to downplay. I fucking love the internet as a user, participant, and someone who builds web stuff professionally. I'm so incredibly grateful that I can speak to my overseas family whenever I want. I remember downloading Google Earth in high school, back when you had to download it as a Desktop application, and spending hours on the nascent street view technology — something I continue to do to this day.

But there is a danger here. Just because I have clicked through the streets of Prague does not mean I have been to Prague. Likewise, just because I saw a man walk on the moon does not mean I have been to the moon, nor am I personally willing to give up transportation infrastructure to watch more people walk on more extraterrestrial bodies. The ease with which we can realistically substitute the experiences of others for our own creates an artificial access to the bounties of society. We celebrate the advancement of medical science when a sportsball player posts an Instagram story after undergoing a new (and expensive) medical treatment that saves their life — as we should — without realizing that our own insurance would deny that same treatment as “not medically necessary.²" Progress exclusively reserved for the elites creates the illusion of social progress, delivered with the emotionally compelling fidelity of an online parasocial relationship.

With all this in mind, let's go back to our comments. Here's the very first one again:

I'm not sure what angle you're getting at op. Things got better for the vast majority of humanity throughout the 20th century, in terms of health, nutrition, nutrition, financial freedom and freedom of expression. It just got disproportionately better for some.

Freedom of expression seems too big a topic for an already-too-long post, so perhaps we'll tackle that another time. But what of the others?

It is true that our healthcare technologies and nutritional knowledge have advanced greatly. But have we made progress? Are we still making progress in health and nutrition (and nutrition)? It is definitely true that, as a society, we know more about these things than ever before, and yet we are facing a global obesity crisis. In 1990, Mississippi was the most overweight state. It still is, but just thirty years later, every single US state and most of Europe is more overweight than Mississippi was then.

Likewise, there's a strong case that “financial freedom" began a decline towards the end of the 20th century. Americans are in ever-increasing debt. Homeownership is declining. Real wages have been declining for almost half a century. Rents are skyrocketing. Many people who went to college at the end of the 20th century are saddled with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of obviously predatory student debt that they cannot even discharge in bankruptcy.³ Medical debt, despite being an absurd and immoral concept, is on the rise.

Much like the rocket example, there has been significant progress in the maximum amount of these things attainable, but access is growing increasingly limited. I posit that what really makes us feel like it's Progress™ is our ability to experience them virtually, which provides a simulacrum of democratic access. We can all watch youtube videos about nutrition, and yet rates of diabetes are skyrocketing. We have TikToks of rags-to-riches stories making it by grinding and hustling, and yet real wages are shrinking. We can learn about breakthroughs in cancer treatments, but many Americans fear the financial consequences of even going to an annual checkup.

Our ability to experience Progress™ virtually is slowly tricking us into forgetting how real progress is made. We cannot be passive recipients of progress. Common access to the shared bounties of our society is an active political project, and has been for millenia. Our current technological world is trapping us. On the one hand, it provides us with the illusion of a shared social progress, but on the other, tech companies feed us a constant stream of content algorithmically determined to make us feel impotent rage. Any political will to actually manifest progress is thereby devoured by the machine that turns rage into clicks and content, perpetuating the profitable cycle of content generation and algorithmic rage consumption. When people feel the despair we have been purposefully socially engineered to feel, we are gaslit by the illusion of shared social progress. As that reddit user put it:

wow lol things actually are getting better , all the time , almost immeasurably so. disgust for the propagandized pessimism reddit loves to circlejerk over.

This is a real travesty. Much like I said in my last post, technology could have been, and perhaps can still be, a real tool for building a better world. We need only look at the last few years to see the stark reality of our failure, because the COVID pandemic has been a case study in the false progress of technology.

The pandemic was and continues to be a massive public health problem, which in turn makes it a political one.⁴ Had we been able to use technology to coordinate the necessary collective action to mitigate it — wearing masks, staying home, getting the vaccines, etc. — some experts say we could have avoided a quarter million unnecessary deaths just between June 2021 and March 2022.

Instead, we see the dynamics I have described. As we began to rely almost exclusively on the tech industry to connect us, the postconsequential rift between reality and our own personal realities grew. Anti-masking, anti-vaccine sentiment, and outright COVID-denialism thrived as the real impacts of a pandemic become less credible through the technologically widened chasm between actions and experienced consequences. QAnon — a worldview in which a child-consuming cabal of pedophiles is behind all our politics and therefore our problems — flourished into a mainstream political force. Even Flat Earth and extraterrestrial esotericism⁵ have become increasingly prevalent.

This may seem like a strange mishmash of unrelated ideas, but they all have one thing in common — they provide emotional satisfaction. In our postconsequentialist world, wearing a mask at the grocery store does nothing for you, but posting about how you bravely stood up for freedom by refusing to wear a mask at the auto parts store brings instant positive reinforcement from these burgeoning online communities. In a world in which the only payoff of any political action is the emotional satisfaction it brings, these communities are a perfect trap, and very lucrative for tech companies. Those caught in the currents of algorithmic despair find refuge in these communities. In the case of QAnon, we have a framework for understanding why political action cannot happen — the adrenochrome-fueled elites won't let it happen. This leads to the profitable postconsequentialist cycle described above, in which users get increasingly disconnected from the real world, which the technology feeds off while further severing the few remaining threads.

Those of us who were not sucked into QAnon⁶ are given the illusion of progress. Public health experts provide daily online briefings about how the most recent studies say we can stay safe, all while our healthcare staff lack PPE and our ability to stay home is subject to the whims of our capitalist overlords. A vaccine was developed in record time — a bonafide scientific miracle if there ever was one — and yet we could not access it as a community because people refused to get it, afraid that it was a microchip and/or the mark of the beast. We were virtually able to experience remarkable achievements in fighting the virus, but in our actual, physical world, I'd say the pandemic won, and its damage goes well beyond the significant and tragic loss of life.

Insomuch as it is a meaningful concept, what even is progress? I'd argue that we all know intuitively what it is. It's more human happiness. Technology has a role to play here. Spending time with my faraway friends is much easier now that we both have the internet, and that makes me happy. That's real progress. But technology is not progress. We should not allow ourselves to be tricked by self-serving technologists selling their false progress. If people are increasingly miserable, and as discussed in my last post, cripplingly lonely, we are not making the progress that matters.