But you're also saying that technology is neutral, no? It would seem then that any technology they create does not have any effect on society, its how society uses it?
May make sense if you're talking about basic technologies, but you were just talking about technology.
I wouldn't say “neutral,” and I certainly wouldn't say that “any technology they create does not have any effect on society.”
My point was that technology doesn't have a will of its own, and most technology can be used in either good or bad ways. So we should think less about whether a technology is inherently good or bad, and more about good vs. bad ways of living with it.
I can get behind this. Also sorry to barade you with questions, but it seems to me that our current paradigm of technology is to actually maximize its spread. Cars aren't really optional anymore and neither is an email. I would say the ubiquity of these devices have made life worse, but the people developing these technologies want them to be ubiquitous for money or the machine or what have you.
Marc Barnes put it well: if you're the only person with a car you're a God. If everyone else has a car you're in traffic.
Seems the tech development and the economy are married to each other in this way.
Well, gee, I say thank heavens for all this isolation. I live in a small city in the Australian tropics, but I can easily (and comfortably) travel to locales all over the world and connect and re-connect with people I care about.
The tools and wonders at our disposal require active thinking, too. They always have. You CAN switch off your phone. You CAN ignore obnoxious social media flame wars. You CAN read more without distractions, and the list goes on.
Side note: when I moved into my current house, I was delighted to discover my lovely neighbours. I found an area where people are friendly and sociable. I could CHOOSE to be a loner, but instead I CHOOSE to engage. Heaven help us – in 2025 people still talk to each other. :-)
Problems described here is little to do with technology and largely about capitalism exploiting those. Notifications, distractions, social media influence - all driven by profits. Trying to meliorate that as technology problem is just endless plugging of leaky boat.
I agree wholeheartedly with your larger point that it is our responsibility—as individuals, families, and societies—to develop a healthy relationship with technology. But I think you understate, and perhaps underestimate, just how vital it is to also create, or to at least allow for, the conditions from which people are actually able to do so. And that is, I think, the rub for many people at the moment: such conditions are already barely "allowed for" for your average person, and much of what is championed as modern tech progress makes those conditions ever more challenging and unrealistic to navigate rather than submit to.
Intentional or not, I think you acknowledged this several times in your piece: "Instead of viewing technology as an external force that acts on us, we should view it as opening up a new landscape of choices and possibilities, which we must navigate." Emphasis on "which we must navigate." It is not a choice, like the choice of whether to smoke cigarettes or not, even though much in the modern digital technology environment is very much a product designed to "feed [our] addictions and anxieties." Unfortunately, it is also "sold" to us as a necessity. And, unfortunately again, it also kind of is. Likewise, you wrote: "New technology often demands adjustments in behavior and institutions: it changes our environment, and we must adapt." I agree. Whether we know better than to "passively submit to the algorithm" or not, it is becoming less and less of an option to steer clear of it entirely. The demand is that we change and act in ways we'd prefer not to. And here again, emphasis on your final words in the sentence: "we must adapt." I respect your inclination to find that exciting and encouraging. But some of us find it extremely depressing, and I suppose I just wish the most gung-ho progress evangelists would make a greater attempt to understand that your meat is another's poison. In either case, we should indeed be agentic and responsible, but in the latter case, no amount of agency or responsibility on my part will make poison not poison.
Quickly: I mean "allow for" more in the "give the necessary time or opportunity for" sense. I don't necessarily mean to imply that we are all literally required to deal with technology in ways other than as we wish, or that we don't have permission or the option to do so. Although, I think there are areas where it is more or less true that we don't have much of an option, including in some of the examples that I will list now.
Every job that requires you to be on a computer all day. Every potential new job opening that requires you to be on LinkedIn, if not various other social media platforms. Every potential new job opening that requires you to use AI. Every creative endeavor (wanting to pursue a career or standing as a writer, for example) that stands no chance of succeeding without having an online presence; acquiescing to using the social media channels that you otherwise detest and reject, for self-promotion; adapting one's behavior and "content" to conform to whatever algorithmic advantage demands. Every restaurant that gives you a QR code for a menu. Every two-factor authentication measure that requires you to have an app for that.
There are many more that are all but inescapable in quite a few aspects of our day-to-day lives, and it wasn't my intention to highlight the ones I did as though they are the most important ones, necessarily. They are just the first ones that come to mind. (I also happen to work in a media job that effectively "requires" me to doomscroll all day; I am allowed to change that, I acknowledge and concede, but see again the first few sentences above.)
Technology changes the set of choices open to us. Yes, it changes the economy, and so it changes what other people are willing to pay you to do. But generally the new options it opens up are better than the ones it closes off. We left behind the ability to make a good living as a blacksmith, but we also eradicated smallpox, ended famine, and connected the world in trade and cultural exchange. I think it's a damn good tradeoff.
If you don't like your options participating in an advanced market economy, you can form your own community like the Amish or something, or you can move to a less advanced country, or if all else fails you can live like a hermit in the woods. In any case, you won't be living worse than many of your ancestors in the past that you seem to prefer.
But if you can't or don't want to do that, then you're just complaining that the rest of the world isn't behaving in ways that are acceptable to or convenient for you.
There is no such thing, in reality, as infinite choice. You will always have some options and not others. In general we have many *more* options now than in the past, even if some that we may romanticize are gone.
We're again in agreement on the general thrust of what you've written.
I think you're right that people have and will continue to always have some options but not others, and that there is (thankfully) no such thing as infinite choice. I am not, for the record, disputing any of that. I am not even disputing that "the new options [technology] opens up are better than the ones it closes off," overall.
But as always, what one person judges as better might be judged as worse by another. And more often than not, if not always, it will be a complicated and contradictory mix of better things and worse things rather than a clear designation of good thing or bad thing. Nothing is wholly good or bad. It's all intertwined. Likewise, whether or not the inevitable tradeoffs that come with making progress and creating "problems of progress" are good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable, worth it or not, depend a lot on what you value in life, where you derive meaning and purpose, what you think makes life worth living and not just a slog of more "life years," and so on.
"Pethokoukis: How can we effectively promote a pro-progress cultural mythos?
"Samuel Matlack: I don’t think we should. If progress were definitionally a good thing, as the word implies, then you’d think we should obviously want to promote it. But the fact that you have to stick 'pro-' in front of it — and 'anti-' for the other side — suggests that the word somewhere along the lines stopped working at its most basic level. I don’t mean to throw up my hands or be relativistic about this. But the progress idea has long had a life of its own, much like 'progressive,' and unless we all know what we mean by it — or, if not, are being specific about it — I find the label really quite useless."
All of that said, I do agree with you that "if you can't or don't want to [choose from the other options still available to you], then you're just complaining that the rest of the world isn't behaving in ways that are acceptable to or convenient for you." Touché. I was doing a bit of that, however unintentionally. But at the same time, isn't that what we're all doing, trying to shape the world and society to function in ways that are acceptable to us? Is your article not a complaint that people aren't taking enough responsibility for creating a healthy relationship with tech?
Also, I'm not pushing back at all on your specific point that eradicating smallpox and ending famine are good examples of progress worth the price of admission. Same goes for child mortality, maternal mortality, global living conditions, and so on. Especially when it comes to certain areas of public health, basically all of which involve science and tech progress, I think we have made progress that is fairly indisputable. I promise you, I've seen the charts and read the articles (e.g., (1) https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past, (2) https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions, and (3) https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better) and as part of my job, I read about progress—albeit from a position of fluctuating skepticism—while doomscrolling on a daily basis.
Lastly(-ish), while I'm sincerely trying to avoid making this about me (another downside of the modern technology you wrote about is that it has, in my opinion, cranked up the dial on humans' self-obsession and their performative nature as online personas, and well, I can rue that all I want, but at the end of the day, I am human and multitudinous), I'd just like to add that I did move to a less advanced country, years ago, but I eventually found my way back to a job in the US that I do remotely from said less advanced country, and I am pleased with this situation despite my "complaints" about it and tech. Like I said, it's a mix of better and worse, and I have chosen to accept this situation as better and view the things that frustrate me about it as an opportunity to learn and grow and debate. So again. Touché. In any case, I would love to unplug from it all and go live in the woods and addictively run and read while much of the rest of the world addictively scrolls through AI-generated reels on their phones, and the day may come when I figure out the logistics of that and do it, but it's obviously not workable for large numbers to choose the "cabin in the woods" approach.
To my original point, though, we are not creating the conditions that might make unplugging from tech easier to do. We are in fact creating the conditions that will (continue to) make it harder to do. We are creating the conditions that coerce people into moving more and more of their lives online (in some cases because they want to, but in many others because they feel they need to), into a hollow simulacrum of reality, one that I would argue is more likely to be a net negative for individuals and societies than a net positive.
On yet another level, the same degradation applies to the online world and the various "creative" expressions that reach us through it. Insofar as we want to be online and benefit from what it has to offer, we have hollowed that out as well by introducing AI like an alien virus into the mix. So the unspoken directive of the world and the conditions many of us have created for ourselves in it, at least at the moment, seems to be: move your "self" online, exist primarily there, among all the old performative emptiness and all the new depressing slop that is but a copy of us at our worst, and accept that the powers that be will extract from you at all points along the way, and don't just accept it, but either be unambiguously happy about it or just sit in shame for your lack of gratitude for our techno-utopic march.
Lastly for real this time, to your point about creating an Amish-like community, that's sort of what I'm doing now. It's just that I'm thinking, like you, about the broader community and what I'd like for it to look like in the future. With that, I'll exit with this quote from Brian J. A. Boyd's "Why We Need Amistics for AI: Tech ethics needs a breakthrough. The Amish have it" (https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-we-need-amistics-for-ai):
"Our tech debates do not begin by deliberating about what kind of future we want and then reasoning about which paths lead to where we want to go. Instead they go backward: we let technology drive where it may, and then after the fact we develop an “ethics of” this or that, as if the technology is the main event and how we want to live is the sideshow."
"we should take an active or agentic perspective on the effects of technology and our relationship to it, rather than a passive or fatalistic one. Instead of viewing technology as an external force that acts on us, we should view it as opening up a new landscape of choices and possibilities, which we must navigate."
Why is this "rather than" and "instead of"? Why not "also" and "in addition"?
Why should we never view technology as a force that acts on people, and always think of people as doing the acting? Why should we ignore the knowledge we have of how people are likely to behave, and only ever try to figure out the ideal way for people to behave?
It seems to me that we can do both of these things. We can think both about what effects technology is likely to have on people who have habits shaped by the technological and societal context of the recent past, and what changes to these habits might lead to better outcomes.
I can agree that it is my responsibility to try to think about the optimal way for myself to use a technology, but I think it is *also* the responsibility of everyone who designs a technology to put it forward in the way that will be optimal for all people. There is plenty of responsibility to go around, and we shouldn't be trying to deflect responsibility in any direction.
We know for a fact that some people will do things suboptimally, so designers *should* take that into account. We also know for a fact that some designers will design technology suboptimally, so users *should* take that into account.
I think I agree with that, which is why I wrote: “This responsibility exists at all levels: from society as a whole, to institutions, to families, down to each individual. Companies should strive to design healthier products…” etc.
Would you say that making something that is destructive in large quantities addictive is bad?
If you were allowed free and easy access to coccaine as a child and got addicted, would it really be your fault?
> This responsibility exists at all levels: from society as a whole, to institutions, to families, down to each individual.
I don't think the author's saying that responsibility should only be at the individual level.
Idk he's saying that the builders should not consider the reprecussions of their actions.
Seems to kind of leave the consumer out in the dust.
I literally said “Companies should strive to design healthier products”
But you're also saying that technology is neutral, no? It would seem then that any technology they create does not have any effect on society, its how society uses it?
May make sense if you're talking about basic technologies, but you were just talking about technology.
I wouldn't say “neutral,” and I certainly wouldn't say that “any technology they create does not have any effect on society.”
My point was that technology doesn't have a will of its own, and most technology can be used in either good or bad ways. So we should think less about whether a technology is inherently good or bad, and more about good vs. bad ways of living with it.
I can get behind this. Also sorry to barade you with questions, but it seems to me that our current paradigm of technology is to actually maximize its spread. Cars aren't really optional anymore and neither is an email. I would say the ubiquity of these devices have made life worse, but the people developing these technologies want them to be ubiquitous for money or the machine or what have you.
Marc Barnes put it well: if you're the only person with a car you're a God. If everyone else has a car you're in traffic.
Seems the tech development and the economy are married to each other in this way.
I said “individuals and families” because parents have to protect their children.
Well, gee, I say thank heavens for all this isolation. I live in a small city in the Australian tropics, but I can easily (and comfortably) travel to locales all over the world and connect and re-connect with people I care about.
The tools and wonders at our disposal require active thinking, too. They always have. You CAN switch off your phone. You CAN ignore obnoxious social media flame wars. You CAN read more without distractions, and the list goes on.
Side note: when I moved into my current house, I was delighted to discover my lovely neighbours. I found an area where people are friendly and sociable. I could CHOOSE to be a loner, but instead I CHOOSE to engage. Heaven help us – in 2025 people still talk to each other. :-)
Problems described here is little to do with technology and largely about capitalism exploiting those. Notifications, distractions, social media influence - all driven by profits. Trying to meliorate that as technology problem is just endless plugging of leaky boat.
I agree wholeheartedly with your larger point that it is our responsibility—as individuals, families, and societies—to develop a healthy relationship with technology. But I think you understate, and perhaps underestimate, just how vital it is to also create, or to at least allow for, the conditions from which people are actually able to do so. And that is, I think, the rub for many people at the moment: such conditions are already barely "allowed for" for your average person, and much of what is championed as modern tech progress makes those conditions ever more challenging and unrealistic to navigate rather than submit to.
Intentional or not, I think you acknowledged this several times in your piece: "Instead of viewing technology as an external force that acts on us, we should view it as opening up a new landscape of choices and possibilities, which we must navigate." Emphasis on "which we must navigate." It is not a choice, like the choice of whether to smoke cigarettes or not, even though much in the modern digital technology environment is very much a product designed to "feed [our] addictions and anxieties." Unfortunately, it is also "sold" to us as a necessity. And, unfortunately again, it also kind of is. Likewise, you wrote: "New technology often demands adjustments in behavior and institutions: it changes our environment, and we must adapt." I agree. Whether we know better than to "passively submit to the algorithm" or not, it is becoming less and less of an option to steer clear of it entirely. The demand is that we change and act in ways we'd prefer not to. And here again, emphasis on your final words in the sentence: "we must adapt." I respect your inclination to find that exciting and encouraging. But some of us find it extremely depressing, and I suppose I just wish the most gung-ho progress evangelists would make a greater attempt to understand that your meat is another's poison. In either case, we should indeed be agentic and responsible, but in the latter case, no amount of agency or responsibility on my part will make poison not poison.
What's an example where you're not “allowed” to deal with technology as you wish, where you don't have the option?
Quickly: I mean "allow for" more in the "give the necessary time or opportunity for" sense. I don't necessarily mean to imply that we are all literally required to deal with technology in ways other than as we wish, or that we don't have permission or the option to do so. Although, I think there are areas where it is more or less true that we don't have much of an option, including in some of the examples that I will list now.
Every job that requires you to be on a computer all day. Every potential new job opening that requires you to be on LinkedIn, if not various other social media platforms. Every potential new job opening that requires you to use AI. Every creative endeavor (wanting to pursue a career or standing as a writer, for example) that stands no chance of succeeding without having an online presence; acquiescing to using the social media channels that you otherwise detest and reject, for self-promotion; adapting one's behavior and "content" to conform to whatever algorithmic advantage demands. Every restaurant that gives you a QR code for a menu. Every two-factor authentication measure that requires you to have an app for that.
There are many more that are all but inescapable in quite a few aspects of our day-to-day lives, and it wasn't my intention to highlight the ones I did as though they are the most important ones, necessarily. They are just the first ones that come to mind. (I also happen to work in a media job that effectively "requires" me to doomscroll all day; I am allowed to change that, I acknowledge and concede, but see again the first few sentences above.)
Technology changes the set of choices open to us. Yes, it changes the economy, and so it changes what other people are willing to pay you to do. But generally the new options it opens up are better than the ones it closes off. We left behind the ability to make a good living as a blacksmith, but we also eradicated smallpox, ended famine, and connected the world in trade and cultural exchange. I think it's a damn good tradeoff.
If you don't like your options participating in an advanced market economy, you can form your own community like the Amish or something, or you can move to a less advanced country, or if all else fails you can live like a hermit in the woods. In any case, you won't be living worse than many of your ancestors in the past that you seem to prefer.
But if you can't or don't want to do that, then you're just complaining that the rest of the world isn't behaving in ways that are acceptable to or convenient for you.
There is no such thing, in reality, as infinite choice. You will always have some options and not others. In general we have many *more* options now than in the past, even if some that we may romanticize are gone.
We're again in agreement on the general thrust of what you've written.
I think you're right that people have and will continue to always have some options but not others, and that there is (thankfully) no such thing as infinite choice. I am not, for the record, disputing any of that. I am not even disputing that "the new options [technology] opens up are better than the ones it closes off," overall.
But as always, what one person judges as better might be judged as worse by another. And more often than not, if not always, it will be a complicated and contradictory mix of better things and worse things rather than a clear designation of good thing or bad thing. Nothing is wholly good or bad. It's all intertwined. Likewise, whether or not the inevitable tradeoffs that come with making progress and creating "problems of progress" are good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable, worth it or not, depend a lot on what you value in life, where you derive meaning and purpose, what you think makes life worth living and not just a slog of more "life years," and so on.
Like The New Atlantis' Samuel Matlack touched on in his piece "Why the Progress Debate Goes Nowhere: You say 'jetpacks,' I say 'cabin in the woods,' let’s call the whole thing off," (https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-progress-debate-goes-nowhere) and in his interview with your comrade in progress James Pethokoukis (https://www.aei.org/articles/debating-progress-a-quick-qa-with-samuel-matlack-of-new-atlantis/), "I don’t mean to throw up my hands or be relativistic about this. But ..."
"Pethokoukis: How can we effectively promote a pro-progress cultural mythos?
"Samuel Matlack: I don’t think we should. If progress were definitionally a good thing, as the word implies, then you’d think we should obviously want to promote it. But the fact that you have to stick 'pro-' in front of it — and 'anti-' for the other side — suggests that the word somewhere along the lines stopped working at its most basic level. I don’t mean to throw up my hands or be relativistic about this. But the progress idea has long had a life of its own, much like 'progressive,' and unless we all know what we mean by it — or, if not, are being specific about it — I find the label really quite useless."
All of that said, I do agree with you that "if you can't or don't want to [choose from the other options still available to you], then you're just complaining that the rest of the world isn't behaving in ways that are acceptable to or convenient for you." Touché. I was doing a bit of that, however unintentionally. But at the same time, isn't that what we're all doing, trying to shape the world and society to function in ways that are acceptable to us? Is your article not a complaint that people aren't taking enough responsibility for creating a healthy relationship with tech?
Also, I'm not pushing back at all on your specific point that eradicating smallpox and ending famine are good examples of progress worth the price of admission. Same goes for child mortality, maternal mortality, global living conditions, and so on. Especially when it comes to certain areas of public health, basically all of which involve science and tech progress, I think we have made progress that is fairly indisputable. I promise you, I've seen the charts and read the articles (e.g., (1) https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past, (2) https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions, and (3) https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better) and as part of my job, I read about progress—albeit from a position of fluctuating skepticism—while doomscrolling on a daily basis.
Lastly(-ish), while I'm sincerely trying to avoid making this about me (another downside of the modern technology you wrote about is that it has, in my opinion, cranked up the dial on humans' self-obsession and their performative nature as online personas, and well, I can rue that all I want, but at the end of the day, I am human and multitudinous), I'd just like to add that I did move to a less advanced country, years ago, but I eventually found my way back to a job in the US that I do remotely from said less advanced country, and I am pleased with this situation despite my "complaints" about it and tech. Like I said, it's a mix of better and worse, and I have chosen to accept this situation as better and view the things that frustrate me about it as an opportunity to learn and grow and debate. So again. Touché. In any case, I would love to unplug from it all and go live in the woods and addictively run and read while much of the rest of the world addictively scrolls through AI-generated reels on their phones, and the day may come when I figure out the logistics of that and do it, but it's obviously not workable for large numbers to choose the "cabin in the woods" approach.
To my original point, though, we are not creating the conditions that might make unplugging from tech easier to do. We are in fact creating the conditions that will (continue to) make it harder to do. We are creating the conditions that coerce people into moving more and more of their lives online (in some cases because they want to, but in many others because they feel they need to), into a hollow simulacrum of reality, one that I would argue is more likely to be a net negative for individuals and societies than a net positive.
On yet another level, the same degradation applies to the online world and the various "creative" expressions that reach us through it. Insofar as we want to be online and benefit from what it has to offer, we have hollowed that out as well by introducing AI like an alien virus into the mix. So the unspoken directive of the world and the conditions many of us have created for ourselves in it, at least at the moment, seems to be: move your "self" online, exist primarily there, among all the old performative emptiness and all the new depressing slop that is but a copy of us at our worst, and accept that the powers that be will extract from you at all points along the way, and don't just accept it, but either be unambiguously happy about it or just sit in shame for your lack of gratitude for our techno-utopic march.
Lastly for real this time, to your point about creating an Amish-like community, that's sort of what I'm doing now. It's just that I'm thinking, like you, about the broader community and what I'd like for it to look like in the future. With that, I'll exit with this quote from Brian J. A. Boyd's "Why We Need Amistics for AI: Tech ethics needs a breakthrough. The Amish have it" (https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-we-need-amistics-for-ai):
"Our tech debates do not begin by deliberating about what kind of future we want and then reasoning about which paths lead to where we want to go. Instead they go backward: we let technology drive where it may, and then after the fact we develop an “ethics of” this or that, as if the technology is the main event and how we want to live is the sideshow."
Thanks for engaging.
"we should take an active or agentic perspective on the effects of technology and our relationship to it, rather than a passive or fatalistic one. Instead of viewing technology as an external force that acts on us, we should view it as opening up a new landscape of choices and possibilities, which we must navigate."
Why is this "rather than" and "instead of"? Why not "also" and "in addition"?
Why should we never view technology as a force that acts on people, and always think of people as doing the acting? Why should we ignore the knowledge we have of how people are likely to behave, and only ever try to figure out the ideal way for people to behave?
It seems to me that we can do both of these things. We can think both about what effects technology is likely to have on people who have habits shaped by the technological and societal context of the recent past, and what changes to these habits might lead to better outcomes.
I can agree that it is my responsibility to try to think about the optimal way for myself to use a technology, but I think it is *also* the responsibility of everyone who designs a technology to put it forward in the way that will be optimal for all people. There is plenty of responsibility to go around, and we shouldn't be trying to deflect responsibility in any direction.
We know for a fact that some people will do things suboptimally, so designers *should* take that into account. We also know for a fact that some designers will design technology suboptimally, so users *should* take that into account.
I think I agree with that, which is why I wrote: “This responsibility exists at all levels: from society as a whole, to institutions, to families, down to each individual. Companies should strive to design healthier products…” etc.