It would be a serious and grave error to attribute all our current woes to capitalism. It is an all-too-common mistake made by writers, political activists, and many others. Indeed, if capitalism were the only problem, it might be possible to bring our destructive modern society down much more easily. How many people, such as Marx, have wondered about alternative solutions that might be preferable to capitalism? And how many have succeeded?
But perhaps the right economic replacement hasn’t come along yet. Perhaps we just need a greater system, or perhaps we just need to alter capitalism enough so that it isn’t so destructive: we could try and do so by adding more regulation, eliminating aggressive forms of advertising and psychological manipulation, and switching to more sustainable technologies. Indeed, such changes are incrementally good, and I certainly encourage them.
However, in this chapter, I argue that there a more fundamental obstruction to taking down our destructive society than just the resistance from global capitalism, and that obstruction is technology itself. More precisely, technology has become sufficiently complex so that it similar to a self-contained entity that has its own interests. Furthermore, one of the best environments for the survival of this entity is the capitalistic environment.
How has technology come to be this way? It comes from a basic tendency that exists is all sufficiently complex systems: that is, in a complex system, a behaviour may arise that is impossible to predict from the original system, such as consciousness coming from the brain. Even with its massive array of neurons, it seems bewildering that something like consciousness could come out of it.
Another example is an ant colony. Even with access to a single live ant, it would be hard or even impossible for the scientist to determine that a population of ants could form an organized colony, assuming that we had never heard of ant colonies before. In short, very complex systems give rise to new, emergent phenomena that have an a level of organization and purpose that cannot be predicted.
Let’s apply this idea to technology. People often say that technology is a tool that we create and we should decide how to use it. But this is fundamentally flawed: technology often gives marginal advantages to those who use it first. Because of this, other people begin to use it and through its increasing usage, the technology becomes widespread becomes widepsread, even if its widepsread use in total is detrimental to humankind. Thus, technology seduces people into using it, even if the end result is a disaster.
The most horrific example is the use of fossil fuels: yes, cars gave us some conveniences and made life better in the very short term, but now we have fragmented habitats with roads and are on the brink of ecological collapse due to global warming.
This is an example of the prisoner’s dilemma, or a situation in which everyone would be better off not doing something, but because some people do the thing for that marginal advantage, everyone is forced into doing it. Of course, not every opportunity to choose to use technology is necessarily a prisoner’s dilemma situation, but many are, especially in the modern era.
Thus, technology grows, often on its own accord through the prisoner’s dilemma, and this growth is often against the wishes of individual human beings. People often don’t choose to use technology on a rational basis that considers both the present benefits and the future harms that it may cause: they instinctually follow the use of technology for its immediate marginal advantage only. This instinct is transformed into a collective instinctual force that competes with any rational discussion about technology on a societal level. We can see this even with the Amish: despite their efforts to maintain a relatively stable culture with minimal ‘English’ technological influence, technology is slowly encroaching upon them and they have made compromises, even though they did not want to do so.
Of course, a strong society that governs with wisdom can oppose the growth of technology. The more a society has a healthy, symbiotic relationship with the planet and the natural biosphere, the less technology and grow within it. But as soon as some technology manages to successfully introduce itself in such societies, it has the potential to push those societies away from intimacy with the earth because the tool creates independence from biological processes. At this point, the human beings in such society can still collectively decide to prioritize sustainability over technological development for short-term gain. But if they do not, technology can very easily develop beyond control.
Unfortunately, technology has spiralled out of control on Earth. The process leads us to think of ourselves as separate from nature, opponents to nature, and in turn weakens the sources of wisdom that come from being one with nature. Now, we have reached the purest form of separateness from nature with the global capitalistic evolutionary environment, which is an environment which is completely devoid of any higher considerations over technological development. To prove this, we need look no further than the immense resistance that society has to addressing climate change and ecological destruction.
This is not to say that some local societies and individuals can’t or don’t make decisions about their own lives. For example, I’ve decided not to use generative AI. The Amish still don’t have television or electricity in their homes. Some people still don’t have a smartphone. Nevertheless, with any new technology, some people will start to use it. And if these technologies yield marginal gains and become more entrenched, more infrastructure in society will come to be dependent on the technology. Eventually, the most successful technologies will transition from being optional to being required. This is true for the smartphone and the computer: it is almost impossible to function in modern society without them for the vast majority of people, even though there may be a few exceptions.
Thus, through the development of global capitalism, we have created an extremely complex system where technology grows: we no longer make collective deliberations on new technologies and thus the growth of the technology is limited only by natural resources that it consumes without returning anything back. Therefore technology is certainly not just a tool. It has turned into a force like any other force such as gravity: although it is not a physical force, it tends in one direction unless properly utilized, respected, feared, and controlled.
Moreover, as time goes on, technology and its amalgamation of humanity is evolving to become more complex, just like life evolved from single-celled entities into complex, thinking apes. This complex system of technology proceeds more and more with a unified purpose independent of our needs, it becomes less and less understandable, and thus harder and harder to stop and control. It is for this reason that we call the collection of all technology together with humanity the technological organism. In other words, the technological organism is a manifestation of artificial life, which in turn is an emergent behaviour from the sufficiently complex system of technology that we have created.
The technological organism is a growing thing, only it is based on silicon instead of carbon. This emphasizes the fact that technology cannot simply be viewed at the atomic level of individual acts of technological creation, just as human beings, societies, and behaviour cannot only be understood at the cellular level or even atomic level!
Using this holistic perspective, we can describe three stages of this organism. The first stage is the stage before the advent of modern communications and fossil fuel use. This stage is analogous to the primitive stage of life of single-celled organisms, moulds, and and other basic entities: growth was primarily though fairly random inventions. And of course, at this time, some basic inventions such as ways to make fire were proabably mostly helpful and improved life. Moreover, since the technological organism was so primitive with very little will of its own, we still had some autonomy in smaller societies as to whether we should use technology.
In this first stage, the technological organism was mostly symbiotic with the planet: it did not cause any immediate disruptions to ecologies beyond some local effects of human expansion.
The second stage of the technological organism is the gaining of a nervous system: this stage is characterized by the introduction of efficient communication and transportation that allows both information and nutrients (metals, stuff from mining, and even human beings) to move throughout the organism. Now, the organism has a primitive brain and even a primitive form of awareness resulting from the sum of awarenesses of human beings and its augmentation through computation.
This second stage is also characterized by the law of diminishing returns: in the first stage, most inventions were mostly helpful to humans and not terribly detrimental, whereas in this second stage, inventions are still marginally useful but improve life for the average person less and less. Just think of the upgrading of wireless cellular networks from 3G to 4G to 5G, or the possibility of 8K or 4K video: not really terribly useful. Yet, technology marches on through the prisoner’s dilemma: we keep destroying the earth for tiny, incremental improvements such as 8K video or faster computers or new phones, with almost no benefit for the average person. (Here we must measure benefit as the difference between the period of time before any adoption, and after WIDESPREAD adoption, not the difference between the period of time before ANY adoption and after a little adoption).
The second stage is also characterized by the organism moving from a symbiotic relationship with humanity and the planet to a parasitic relationship: it draws energy through resources but does not give much back compared to the destruction it effects.
The third stage of the technological organism is marked by the creation of a highly cohesive thinking brain that has already started to come about through artificial intelligence. In this stage, the refinement of technological development is complete: technology progresses ONLY for the sake of technology, and human beings exist only as cogs in to further the industrial machine. This is the stage that we are transitioning to now throught the efforts of a few evil and soulless individuals like Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever.
Moreover, the third stage is marked by a reduced need for human beings: AI is starting to replace human being in jobs that are considered creative. Of course, one may debate on whether AI is truly creative and how we are different from generative LLM artificial intelligences, but the fact remains: we are being replaced, even if that replacement seems to us to be just a crude simulation of creativity.
These three stages of development of the technological organism help us to distinguish the different levels of organization of technology. In the future, it may be required to define a fourth stage of development in which human beings are discarded completely, and the organism realizes a guaranteed way in which it can live completely without biological life. If this happens, then the technological organism will begin by consuming as many resources as possible and possibly even getting rid of us altogether. Of course, I hope that this book will be part of a movement that will destroy the higher functions of the organism so that human beings can once again take control of technology while they simulatenously shift into a more harmonious relationship with nature.
Technological Determinism
This model of technology as the technological organism is no doubt closely related to the concept of technological determinism. What is technological determinism? According to Professor Thomas Hauer, it is
the belief that technology is the principal initiator of the society’s transformation.
In other words, technological determinism is the thesis that technology shapes society, and human choices have relatively little to do with the matter. Is this true, and if it is, does it mean that the technological organism cannot be stopped?
The answer to that question is dependent on what one means by ‘principal initiator of the society’s transformation’. People have defined technological determinism in different ways, from the very extreme view of technology developing independent of social influence to the more mild view of technology having some form of autonomy and a significant influence on society. Thus it’s no wonder that there is such disagreement in the literature and misunderstandings among people in general: the definitions themselves are vague, much of the ‘research’ is published by fanatical social constructivists, and very few people tend to study the topic of technology seriously.
We argue that the question of whether technology influences society or vice versa is akin to arguing whether we influence the environment or whether the environment influences us: it’s a fool’s errand to think in terms of the creator and the created, or in terms of what influences what. Instead, we must view the development of technology through proccesses in a complex system where we exist and where the technological organism exists. It is the same in biology: the environment gives rise to organisms, but the organisms also influence and modify the environment in a continuously interacting system of physical phenomena and biological evolution.
Using biology as a guide, it is clear that to understand the vague notion of determinism, we should rather ask specific questions such as:
- To what extent could we stop a given emergent technology, given that a majority of people realize that its widespread adoption would be detrimental to society, even if its initial nascent use gives an advantage to a few?
- To what extent could we remove a given technology from our society, given that we have discovered that the future would be worse off with such a technology than without?
- To what extent can we alter the path of technological development to better suit human needs?
- How can we measure the effects we do have on the development of technology?
The technological organism coexists with us. There are both elements of symbiosis and parasitism in our relationship to it, and our societies are shaped by its existence, just like human societies are shaped by human individuals and the biosphere. We can make some choices about which technologies to use and individuals make choices about which technologies to develop, but statistically speaking, humans develop technologies with regularity just as plants grow and technological inventions are adopted on the basis of its ability to provide marginal advantages. At a high level however, the organism grows and strengthens itself, and we need to also understand this at a high-level perspective. Indeed, once we agree to look at technology as an organism with a sort of life, we are immediately confronted by serious issues:
- The technological organism may act according to a simulated thought process that resembles intelligence, but this ‘intelligence’ may have properties not expected of what we traditionally think of as intelligence.
- The technological organism is more diffuse and cannot be easily visualized since it does not have a traditional body, but is distributed across many entities. Therefore, we may underestimate it and find it counterintuitive that the organism could have a will of its own.
In other words, the technological organism is definitely an organism, but it might be an organism that has counterintuitive properties similar to some axioms (or rules) of mathematics that seem benign but imply bizarre results such as the Banach-Tarski paradox. Because we influence the information and input/output of the organism, it may be using our collective mental intelligence to power its own neural processes as well as a bootstrapping method to gain independent intelligence. (Again, it may not do this completely consciously. But then again, neither did we: consciousness in us seemed to have arisen out of a process of increasingly neural complexity.)
In fact, we must pay extreme attention to the possibilities for counterintuitive behaviour from the technological organism, and this is because it develops exceptionally rapidly. In biological evolution, it took millions of years for organisms as complex as us to arise. To have a similar process occur in a matter of decades or centuries is like the blink of an eye: such speed might be as incomprehensible to us as trying to read the writing on a bullet as it passes out of the barrel of a gun.
So, me must ask questions such as: what are the intentions of the organism? How does it defend itself? How can it be tamed, stopped, and reduced back to the level of a more primitive organism? Because if we instead continue to insist on looking at technology as a loose collection of individual components, we will be as lost as trying to study the complex behaviour of interacting species from the point of view of cells: yes, we can see a mass of cells moving around, and understanding our own cells gives us some idea about how to take care of our own bodies, but it does not tell us anything about society.
Moreover, we must propagate this high-level viewpoint to the general public, as many people in society do have a belief that technology and progress marches forward, and that progress is difficult or impossible to stop. I’ve seen this myself in the many discussions I’ve had about technology. For example, after describing my fears about the societal damage that AI will cause, one person replied,
I think you are absolutely correct in your assessment and I think there is absolutely nothing that can be done about it.
Many other people have told me time and again that they believe that we cannot stop progress.
But nothing lasts forever and a determined group of revolutionaries could take down the technological organism and kill it. The killing of the technological organism should be followed by a general new philosophy of a respect for nature and for human life, because right now we are replacing our once symbiotic relationship with nature with a parasitic one in which we extract, extract, extract, without ever giving back.
However, the existence of the technological organism does imply that technology as an entity is a powerful enemy that is resilient and hard to kill. It continually evolves and develops defense mechanisms that make any attack on it difficult. But again, not impossible: just as the technologists believe that technology can do anything, so do I believe that the human spirit can do anything, including conquer the disaster that is technology. If there’s one life form that deserves death, it is the technological organism.
Since the technological organism is so complex and is on the verge of developing a highly cohesive ‘brain’ for lack of a better word, it is quite difficult to understand. For example, as with human consciousness, it is impossible to pinpoint the moment in time at which the technological organism became sufficiently cohesive such that it started to contain features of consciousness or will. Perhaps it was some time before the internet where near-instantenous communication was possible, and large amounts of data could not be transmitted as today. But regardless, the organism is evolving and becoming stronger.
Consequence: Support Shifted to the Organism
The main consequence of the existence of the technological organism is that we are no longer driven by human interests. Instead, we have created a new type of organism with a will of its own, just in the same way a collection of ants have the will to build an ant colony, even if none of the individual ants understand how to build the colony all by him or herself. What does the technological organism want? Just like all organisms, it wants to grow. And in the process, it shifts the direction of society away from human happiness and biospheric health to the growth of the technological organism itself.
Indeed, suppose that we can define happiness so that it corresponds to maximum sustainability and biospheric health. This happiness also include nonhuman organisms as as well since those are also crucial for the functioning of the planet. Before technology, before the age of technology, the earth functioned as a single organism that did maximize this happiness. Of course, it is true that not all organisms were free from pain and disease. But, the overall biosphere was stable and all organisms lived as well as they could within the restriction of this stability.
But over time, we have replaced much of our dependence on the natural world with technology. This in turn has necessitated the growth of technology at the expense of the natural world. Our previous symbiotic relationship with earth’s resources has turned into a parasitic one. In this new parasitic relationship, instead of the earth benefitting from our actions and us benefitting from the earth’s actions, we have vastly accelerated our benefits at the expense of the earth.
But, our benefits are short-term. We are already suffering from the long-term negative effects: climate change, overpopulation, the destruction of natural systems that cannot be recovered, and pollution. Moreover, because we have shifted our trust in life from the natural world to the technological organism, we depend on it now. We have created a world through capitalism and technology that necessitates us making decisions to make the organism grow. Another way of looking at it is that the organism itself ‘wants’ to grow because we want it to grow.
Moreover, we can see that technology is advancing for the sake of itself: ask yourself, how much technology do you really need to make your life comfortable? Most poeple are beyond the point of being able to derive true value from new technology. They already have enough. Yet, technology marches forward. Why? For the sake of itself, the technological organism.
In short, we are replacing the natural components of our environment with technological components. This has naturally created the system of capitalism, because technology implies the creation of new physical objects that are owned, which in turn imply trade. By doing so, we have created the evolutionary system as described in the previous chapter, which in turn means that we have essentially switched to growing a technological organism. And, the technological organism is quite different than the living organism: while the living earth gives us life through a healthy and sustainable change, the technological organism ruthlessly destroys life and the biosphere for a much less meaningful life of slavery for us.
Because technology is fundamentally unsustainable, we have made a near-permanent trade: the life of the earth for the life of technology.
Within this system, we are mindless drones, becoming more and more like the cells within our bodies whose only function is to keep us alive. We are the cells now of an organism that is made up of human beings and metal and technology. And like any organism, it needs to eat: it eats nature.
But unlike other organisms, it does not give back to nature. Instead, it just consumes destructively until nothing is left. Thus, this organism is fundamentally incomptabile with the functioning of the biosphere itself and is thus unethical and evil.
An Evil Symbiosis with Capitalism
How is the growth of the technological organism related to capitalism? Global capitalism is the evolutionary environment that promotes the development of technology: just like fish need water and we need air, the technological organism needs capitalism. This can be visualized in the following diagram:
This diagram shows the symbiotic relationship between capitalism and technology: capitalism is the enviroment that propels technological growth beyond human need into the realm of growth for the sake of growth. It provides a fertile ground for ideas and inventions to flourish, where the criteria to flourish is simply the ability to reward short-term profit at the cost of all else. Global capitalism also eradicates mechanisms that allow decision-making based on considerations other than profit so that technologically can evolve no matter how destructive it is.
In turn, the technological organism is precisely what reinforces global capitalism. It provides the communications networks for efficient exchange and for the creation of new global markets, and it provides the physical force required to extract resources and enforce the law of the establishment. Without much of the technology we invented in the last hundred years, global capitalism simply would not be possible or it would not be as efficient as it is. Without the technology powering law enforcement and the military, we could much more easily revolt and collapse unsustainable supply chains through revolutionary resistance. And without global capitalism, there would be very little incentive for most people to continue furthering technology.
But what about the benefits to us? Does the advancement of technology actually help us as some argue? Yes, at one time, innovation was beneficial to this world and to humanity, at least to some extent. However, for every avenue of creation there is a point at which the law of diminishing returns kicks in and life can no longer be improved in a meaningful way. However, because innovation gives slight economic advantages to individuals over time, they are in a sense forced to develop new technology. Consumers often have no choice but to buy new technology. This is how the technological organism grows even if we don’t need new technology. We have already mentioned cellular networks, such as the transition to 3G, 4G, and 5G, but almost every new technology is like this: new cameras, phones, computers, etc.
After all, if telecommunications companies agree to replace all their networks, what else can we do but buy new phones, new computers, and other devices, not only because older phones may not support the more advanced protocols, but also because more powerful phones are required to run the more powerful apps that take advantage of the faster network. But did the life of the average person improve? Not much, and any improvement is definitely offset by the tremendous environmental damage caused by e-waste and the massive datacenters required to store the massive data that justifies the very existence of faster networks.
We can summarize as follows: capitalism furthers technological growth for the sake of growth through a pathological arms race, thus strengthening the technological organism. And, as technology grows, there are more and more opportunities for the prisoner’s dilemma to take place through capitalism, and this causes an even faster rate of growth of technology.
Therefore, we come to a frightening conclusion: the technological organism and capitalism are now almost self-sustaining through their symbiotic relationship. They grow and operate with just a little help from us. Yes, we must put in significant effort to make new technology, but we are just the substrate on which technology grows. Technology uses us and minimally keeps us alive for its relentless need to consume and destroy natural resource to keep growing. This self-sustaining growth is ushering in the third stage of the technological organism, where it will be the most difficult to stop.
Humanity as a Subtrate
Now, we need to understand what it means to say that humanity is a substrate on which technology grows. According to my dictionary, a subtrate is ‘the surface or material on or from which an organism lives, grows, or obtains its nourishment’. This perfectly fits the role of humanity in how it is related to technology.
After all, people are the active, conscious entity that propels individual technologies forward. In fact, many people have even been brainwashed to want the organism to grow, because they have become addicted to new advancements and want to keep seeing them. They become excited through the news media of announcements of new phones, new computers, and new methods of entertainment. Our basic drive to recognize things we can use in the short term make us want to create new innovations.
In effect, technology latches onto us and from the creation of new technologies, we are also given new tasks that simply would not exist without technology. New hobbies are created and new problems are presented for us to solve, just because more technology exists. Would we really be interested in the vast majority of these problems if it were only for our own sake or the benefit of our own small communities? Probably not.
Think of problems like optimizing an SQL database, machine learning to make advertising more effective, or building a social network. If all technology were to self-destruct right now and we had to go back to a more primitive way of life, would anyone care about these problems? Probably not. These problems aren’t necessary for survival and their solutions do not help the average human being. Yet, technology latches onto us by providing us these intellectual amusements so that we solve them and consequently grow technology.
Furthermore, at every step, technology actually takes away from us activities that we once would consider fulfilling, and replaces them with new ones. We only don’t notice because this replacement takes place over generations, and new generations grow up into a world thinking it is the normal mode of operation for humanity.
We are also deceived because we think we are making life easy. But in reality, we are making life efficient and reducing struggle. At some point, life will become so efficient that we won’t really have to do anything. The people that want to do intellectual tasks will solve nearly meaningless problems like optimizing more algorithms and the people that don’t want to do such problems will do nothing except consume media.
As a substrate, we are also stimulated into growing technology through fear. By creating a huge network capable of storing and transmitting a near limitless amount of information, human beings are made aware of almost every possible danger. We are also exposed to more dangers through the physical aspect of mass global transportation.
Once that fear has been sufficiently propagated and introduced into minds around the globe, technology offers a way to mitigate or eliminate the fear. Of course, most people will take the technological solution out of our will to survive. Again, this instinct is perfectly normal, but when put under the lens of our incredibly advanced technology, is is magnified and turned into a new maladaptive instinct.
Think of what would happen if COVID occurred at a time where we had no technology and very little scientific understanding. There would be no airplanes to transmit it, and no communications technologies to transmit information about it. Moreover, we would hardly know anything about it since we would not have science.
Even if most people would get the virus, some would suffer some permanent damage, and many would die. However, humanity would go on, and live as they lived before. Many people would get the virus and be totally fine. As an entire population, we would not be seriously hampered and life would continue as always.
However, since we have advanced scientific knowledge, we isolated and identified the COVID virus. Because of technology, we had the choice to completely isolate ourselves. Moreover, we developed even more technology because of COVID and even became more reliant on it. Everybody has been convinced of how horrible COVID is and how safe technology is keeping us.
In other words, technology brings new dangers that in turn seem to require new technology to mitigate these dangers. Every time we discover a new way to prevent some sort of death, no matter how unlikely the danger, we will take it. However, death is a part of life and to so completely avoid it is leading to something very far from a natural and wholesome way of life. Yet, technology gives us a way to avoid death at every turn, and thus we take it out of instinct.
Let’s take a more trivial example: some phones have a program to help you keep a good sleeping schedule via alarms and notifications. Is this a good thing? Well, chances are if we didn’t have so many screens and devices, we wouldn’t even need this technology. Anyone who has tried camping in the woods knows that living there for a few days makes it very easy to go to sleep at the same time and have a good sleeping schedule. That is how technology works. It helps in one area, hurts in another, and then solves the second problem while creating a third. However, with technology, the successive problems just become worse because society becomes so dependent on technology that we just move further and further away from humanity. We don’t realize it because most people will never accept that eradicating danger and making us even more safe can be anything but a good thing.
Discussion
We have seen that technology has become sufficiently complex that it threatens the happiness of earth, and indeed has already exacted an immense toll of destruction on the beauty of natural life. Moreover, technology is not the only problem: while technology has been growing through a series of prisoner’s dilemma scenarios throughout history, it is modern capitalism that has pushed it to new heights of growth. And in turn, technology itself is what has caused such an efficient and ruthless system of capitalism.
The technological organism wants to survive and therefore, it will keep destroying more natural resources. Since the organism is so abstract, it is much different than a typical enemy and we cannot always rely on our intuition to fight against it. Yet, it has already proceeded through two stages of development: the first in which we had relative control over it as it was similar to a primitive organism. However, through a general application of values such as capitalism and consumerism, we have brought the technological organism into the second stage, where it has a relatively sophisticated nervous system made possible by the telecommunications and transportation networks, crucial for moving around resources and information as needed.
And now, the organism is integrating us ever more tightly within itself to the point where there is no individual alternative: this is the end result of growth into stage three, where it has something akin to consciousness. Indeed, at one time, could you take a few friends and go off and live away from this society? Yes. It might be hard but it would be possible. With the elimination of human will through our subservience to the organism, it is nearly impossible to live away from it. I can no longer take a few friends and live independently of technology.
Yes, there is still a small amount of land that we could get lost in, but even then, we might have to rely a little on the global capitalistic, technological system. We would have to rely on the organism. Moreover, we would always be either within or nearly within sight of the organism: even if I take some cash to buy canned food at a small store, the owner will likely have a smartphone and it will be listening.
Even for people who do not want to leave the system, they are very highly integrated within it. They are not just living in a neighbourhood and contributing positively towards society. People are forced at virtually every turn to accelerate consumerism. For example, it is very difficult to avoid advertising these days. In the past, you could just not read the newspaper and stay at home. Nowadays, the internet is full of advertising, and some creeps through even if you use an ad-blocker.
Moreover, the primary function of most jobs is no longer to contribute positively towards human communities. Rather, they exist to increase the efficiency of the market so that technology is developed much faster than ever before. Of course, some jobs help people, but helping people has become a side-effect of increasing the growth of the technological organism.
In short, we are tightly bound and imprisoned within the organism, and everything we do is no longer for the good of our individual selves but for the organism instead. Sometimes, it may appear that we are doing something good, but that is only exactly in the way our body takes care of its cells: yes, it keeps them healthy when it needs them, and it discards them just as easily when it doesn’t.
The conclusion is that we are reaching a point where rebellion against the technological organism is becoming harder and harder, because the organism is not only becoming stronger, but because we made more dependent on it every day.
Nevertheless, the technological organism realizes that some people may pose a threat to it. To minimize this threat, it isolates us, and it does so in two ways. First, it isolates us from nature. The entire reason why people might be inclined to rebel is because of nature. Our connection to nature, at least on a basal level, is more important than a connection with technology. Deep down inside, we know we need nature and exposure to nature will make us much more likely to want to stop the technological organism.
Thus, the organism isolates us from nature. The most obvious way it does so is that it destroys nature, because it consumes nature in order to survive and grow. But the technological organism doesn’t just passively isolate us from nature by eating in order to grow. It actively isolates us by providing distractions and entertainment in the form of the drug of mass media. Through this drug we are more likely to stay inside and stay in front of a screen.
But can’t we just choose not to watch and interact with technology? Unfortunately, it’s harder than it seems because most social interaction these days is through technology. This ties into another method in which technology isolates us: it does so by making us independent from other people in the ways that matter. We no longer have to rely on people if we need answers because most answers are just a search away. We no longer need as many local specialists because Youtube presents millions of tutorials on every possible subject. We no longer need our neighbours to borrow anything because we can have one-day shipping on Amazon, and so forth.
This lack of necessity is precisely what destroys communities and connections between people who truly care about each other. At the same time, the destruction of communities does not destroy the need that people have for social interaction. But because communities are destroyed, where does this interaction come from? Technology again provides the ‘answer’: online interaction in a pseudo-anonymous way that provides the minimal amount of superficial interaction so that people do not go mad. On the other hand, this level of communication is so superficial compared to deeper relationships that we are constantly deprived, and again, seek out media just to see fictional relationships of people to further avoid the realization that our communities have been stolen from us.
Of course, fiction has been around long before advanced technology, and in itself is not a bad thing. The only difference now is that fictional media doesn’t just provide entertainment. Instead, it serves a new function as this drug that is needed in much greater quantities, so much so that we created AI to make more of it.
In the long term, what we lose are the fundamental human connections that we would have made if we were more dependent on each other. These are also precisely the types of relationships that could allow us to become more easily independent of the technological organism, which is another reason they are being eroded.
It is also true that innovations have been giving us more independence gradually since the start of humanity. However, if we defined a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 means we have no independence and 100 means every human is completely independent from every other human but completely dependent on technology, then development up until the 1960s has probably pushed us to 20 out of 100 whereas the modern internet is pushing us closer to 80 or even 90 out of 100. It is this extreme form of independence that is bad for us. It is again the law of diminishing returns: some technology might have arguably created better lives, but beyond that point, it is like putting too much salt on your food: it is deadly.
Conclusion
The technological organism is the amalgamation of human beings with technology, which has reached a sufficient level of complexity to act largely for its own sake rather than for the benefit of humankind and the biosphere.
That does not imply that the organism is unstoppable or that technology is deterministic, but it does mean that we have a formidable enemy to stop if we are to reclaim a symbiotic relationship with the earth, and discard our parasitic nature.
This enemy can be killed, but we need to act fast. In the later parts of this book, I will describe the theoretical nature of change and what we can do to take down the technological organism that is powered and furthered by ruthless capitalism.