Human Flourishing

OCTOBER 2023 — The times are changing. The world is undergoing a major technological revolution. The rate of development is too fast and when something changes too fast it becomes impossible to adapt to. It's like a hurricane — a violent mismatch of velocity between the wind and the ground. Technological change today is much faster than the natural speed of human development and it keeps accelerating like crazy. What is worse, tech is not being accelerated to serve human needs anymore but in the service of capital and profit. We already live in a post-scarcity society, it just doesn't feel like it because of inequality. We have all the technology we need to achieve the prosperity of all people, it exists already. But there are powerful voices insisting otherwise. They want to reach Mars, they want cars to drive themselves, they claim the key to prosperity is making computers seem like humans. But maybe they are only projecting, it's their own prosperity they are thinking about.

There is little precedent for this much technological change. Never had any generation endured so much. Never had our species needed to adapt so quickly. The motorcar spread like fire in the twentieth century and the freeways razed cities to the ground, changing our way of life with noise, pollution, and traffic. The Global Internet (released in 1995) changed everything again, completely altering the face of humankind. In less than 30 years, the Internet violently transformed everything, quickening life and making it weirder. We spend so much time online, it's unhealthy. We made it so easy to work and have fun on the Internet, that we forgot Reality is offline. And as the Internet speeds everything up, the pace of change only increases. But if you pause and think of a car crash for a second, it will remind you that speed is dangerous. On the road as in life, the quicker one goes the easier it is to have an accident; it denies you enough time to react.

For all the wonders of technology, we are abusing the art. We are filling everything with chips, making things harder to own and repair, too sophisticated for the everyday person to understand. We are also making people dependent. No longer can you live a day without a phone, it's the opposite of freedom. We have let Silicon Valley types reshape the nature of work, life, and culture at their convenience, creating artifacts that rewire human dynamics for the sake of profit with no regard for unintended consequences. Meanwhile, the world is burning, decent homes are becoming unaffordable for everyone, job security is increasingly rare, medical bills inspire terror, and retirement is a ticking bomb for most. Those are the things that matter the most... where is the progress? Never in history had people been more productive, our economic surplus is at an all-time high... where is it going?

Technology is the vessel that replicates capital. That is why powerful people won't oppose it, because improving technology gives them leverage over everyday folk. Capital creation is their highest aspiration, the control of which gives them ownership of the surplus generated by the work of everyone. That is why people can't afford having children anymore. Their unstated goal (perhaps unconciously) is to effect class servicedom, a stratified society where every class serves the needs of capital owners in order to survive. It is happening, you can see it playing out in education, healthcare, and housing, even at the way we board planes at the airport (priority system). The system encourages the segregation of people by ability to pay. It was most evident during COVID, when the poorest didn't have a choice but to keep working while the powerful sheltered in vacation homes.

We need a change of heart. Dreaming of human flourishing by technologically-amplified greed is either silly or dishonest. We need to acknowledge that not everything is going well. We need a sense of class solidarity with everyday people... Can we become a society that won't allow the immiseration of anyone, under any circumstance? We need a movement of social transformation that promotes human dignity and the eradication of misery, a culture of meaningful and gainful employment that values rest, relaxation, and time spent with family. We are not going to making it out of exploitation through exploitation... How do we envision a world that could be otherwise? We need an off-ramp from the dynamics that are causing harm, a new philosophy of progress that delivers on the shared hopes of the people to live a good and decent life. You don't need to do anything but we really need people who will. The cost of inaction is real.