Why Technology Favors Tyranny
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I have a problem with this premise. Anyone that knows history knows that humans were as tame, if not tamer, in the past. Plus uneducated.
Most of humanity has never been agile, curious and resourceful. Historically a handful of people were, and they tried to steer everyone around them.
I'd say we are less cow-like than we've ever been. A ton more people have access to education than they ever did. The only thing the new technologies (like the internet) are exposing is the depth of the veneer of education the vast majority of people had, and that depth was very shallow.
I'd say that in some regards this is actually better. Transparency tends to help and now a lot more people can see through the covers. It will just take time to adjust.
Nota bene: I still believe that most people, most of the time, are passive. Being active is a lot of work and truly active people will be always the outliers. It's just that we can increase the percentage of active people by making it easier for them to be active.
This book from Steven Pinker talks about this topic and its one of the best books I have read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...
I also don't think they are linked. There is a definite difference to being civilised and being tame. MLK and Gandhi were civilised, and non-violent, but were certainly not tame.
You might can't imagine that, coz you probably didn't live under one.
Currently in China, there are tons of people (personally I'd say most) prefer to live inside the "protection against malicious misinformation" of the great firewall. They have "everything they want" there, they listen to authoritative info and fend off doubts spontaneously.
Looks like an interesting book.
I know that percentage wise, violence has been decreasing. But is it simply that modern governments are bigger, more powerful, and can better contain and direct violence? Or are modern people actually less violent as far as their culture and psychology? I wonder because even in modern times we've seen incredibly developed and cultured societies turn violent and gruesome very quickly.
Having effective, more or less trustworthy police and courts goes a long way toward both making violent behavior risky, and reducing the need for vigilante justice/vengeance violence. And civil courts help resolve disputes without resorting to violence.
Likewise, trade and economic stability have become so effective that it makes little sense for nations to engage in war with their neighbors anymore. War is bad for business!
Pinker identifies five "historical forces" that have favored "our peaceable motives" and "have driven the multiple declines in violence." They are:
The Leviathan – the rise of the modern nation-state and judiciary "with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force," which "can defuse the [individual] temptation of exploitative attack, inhibit the impulse for revenge, and circumvent ... self-serving biases."
Commerce – the rise of "technological progress [allowing] the exchange of goods and services over longer distances and larger groups of trading partners," so that "other people become more valuable alive than dead" and "are less likely to become targets of demonization and dehumanization."
Feminization – increasing respect for "the interests and values of women."
Cosmopolitanism – the rise of forces such as literacy, mobility, and mass media, which "can prompt people to take the perspectives of people unlike themselves and to expand their circle of sympathy to embrace them."
The Escalator of Reason – an "intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs," which "can force people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, to ramp down the privileging of their own interests over others', and to reframe violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won."
They needed to kill humans one by one with blades and rocks and this was cumbersome and messy. At 3000 kills by minute we, definitely, are much more violent than they.
I have a problem with this premise! My experience has been that when you look closely enough, most people are agile and curious within the sphere of their own action. What varies is the scale they believe they can act at, which can be a matter of internal motivation, social pressures and molding, or hard constraints.
The history you are referring to is one where people with the spare time and education to write histories have consistently assumed that masses have low ambition due to missing internal drive. That perspective is blind to forces that make high ambitions impractical for many people. This article is about how technology can sometimes contribute to those forces.
All that said, I agree with where you land here: the fix is for us to make tech that makes it easier for more people to be active.
If we look at examples of people who historically have had access to all the base resources they required, they weren't all active. Examples: Roman aristocracy, medieval feudal classes, modern day tycoon fortune inheritors. Only a small percentage were truly active most of the time.
In my opinion it's not even healthy to be always active. It generally takes time away from down time with your friends and family.
Basically think of what the majority of people consider "fun" and/or "relaxing": watching sports, movies, TV series, listening to music, going to parties, hiking, reading a book, etc.
I'd define "active" as not doing things most people consider "fun" and/or "relaxing".
Where would creativity or curiosity fit in that definition?
> I'd define "active" as not doing things most people consider "fun" and/or "relaxing".
I don't find that definition very intuitive.
In this regard, most people are active though do not have means to be active on global scale.
In this definition, limited "passive" entertainment and consumption count as long as they bring long term positive results.
> I'd define "active" as not doing things most people consider "fun" and/or "relaxing".
Example: hunter gatherers were not only stronger, they were taller and had wider jaws that fit all their teeth better. They also had fewer cavities than both farmers and modern humans. I personally think humans have lower tolerance for carbohydrates than most realize, and that we’re missing out on a lot of fat soluable compounds in our diets, such as K2.
They also typically lived healthier, although not always longer. Obviously war, predation, and disease cut the life expectancy of hunter gatherers a lot. But if you exclude the unlucky, they actually remained active into remarkably old ages, seeing skeletons who showed signs of hunting into their 80s is not unheard of at all. Our aging might make it to their 80s much more regularly, killing off the sabertooths helped, but they’re hobled by mental and physical degeneration at distressingly high rates.
Malnutrition was very common until very recently even among hunter gatherers. Bad season? Sorry, half of your family starves and the other is sick.
That said, early settled people had it even worse.
They did get more exercise, but that is possible, easy in fact, to match, and results will likely be limited.
1. Cavities kill.
2. Teeth are a good proxy for general health.
The bit about morbidity is bog standard anthropological information from any university. Quick googling for “hunter gatherer mortality” brings up plenty of sources.
I personally focus on pre-history, since early “civilization” was awful. We’ve only recently climbed out of the low life expectancies that started with the advent of farming.
What matters is how adaptable we are. And we certainly are the most adaptable we have ever been. It might be thought that people use all of the technology as a crutch and would not be able to survive if they were transported to a world without it. But, after a couple of days, modern people would get used to what they have, make do, and be creative in solving problems. It would be hard and painful, but that's the nature of adapting.
The point is that our ancestors up until 10,000 years ago would make us look like complete and utter wimps, which contradicts your “most people were inactive” premise.
And based on what happens to a modern human even with survival gear who gets lost in the wilderness, typically death within a week or two sans rescue, I genuinely doubt that modern humans would adapt quickly enough to a hunter gatherer world.
My point was that they were less adaptable. For example, the climate changed and they were unable to adapt. I stated that they had bigger brains and more advanced technology. Neanderthals were more intelligent than Sapiens.
I had no premise that “most people were inactive”. I honestly have no idea where you think I said this.
A single human alone would probably die no matter when they were from. We have always been a social species. A group of humans would be fine anywhere that was not a massive extreme (desert, tundra) unless they had experience in these locales.
Anthropologists know that ancient hunter gatherers were stronger, fitter, and typically had lower rates of morbidity than us. Which kind of undermines your “agile” and “tame” bit.
I’d also say going from nothing to stone tools counts as quite resourceful, if you ask me. Given that our ancestors had the same basic wiring and larger brains, I’d actually wager on them being more curious and clever than modern humans.
Hunter gatherers didnt know what chemicals to mix to create a battery, or use that battery to power magnets, and that if you power them in the correct order you can spin things, and with spinning, you have our modern way of moving energy.
I also lift weights, likely unbelievable weights that couldnt be sustained for a hunter gatherer due to lack of food.
Size doesnt matter as much as environment. I have an abundance of food and information, while this was scarce 10,000 years a go.
The second is dubious. Ancient hunter gatherers were persistence hunters. Go walk for 50 miles a day for a few days and then carry the kill home and I’ll believe that you’re stronger.
Hell, for that matter go kill a mastadon and then carry the meat home. Watch out for wolves!
The idea of villages and more possessions than you can carry didn't happen until agriculture became a thing. The people that lived off big game hunting with stone age tools and no pack animals were set up for it.
I’m pushing back against OPs idea that humans weren’t agile for most of history. Hunter gatherers were about as tough as humans get.
It's important to divide between history and pre-history, though - living conditions for stone age tribes were very different than for civilizations, which had agriculture and permanent structures and all the benefits and problems that go with those things.
Sperm whale's brains are more than 6 times the size of ours. Maybe size doesn't matter as much as you think it does.
Our ancestors however had basically the exact same neurological wiring, roughly the same amount of body to control, and even more neurons crammed into their skulls. Hence the theory that they’d be more clever than modern humans.
I think I have a pretty accurate reading of history...
* Unimaginable to modern day people.
The past is full of revolutions, revolts, regional struggles, dethronings, and so on -- since time immemorial.
Humans were anything than tame.
>Most of humanity has never been agile, curious and resourceful. Historically a handful of people were, and they tried to steer everyone around them.
That's the myth of the "sole inventor" and the "great leader".
Most of progress have been a much more mass struggle...
If you'd put me in the living conditions lived their whole lives, I'd be waaay less tame then they were. Trust me, they were tame (in good part because they didn't know any better). And I'm not only talking about physical conditions, but about psychological degrading ones.
They'd blow up only when they were literally starving (or their families were).
Now we become violent for things which in the past were day-to-day life.
Oh please. This is exactly the same sort of claptrap Kanye West was on, and Ta-Nehisi Coates already pointed out how dumb and ahistorical it was: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/05/im...
And you sent me a link to a 20k+ word article... TL;DR?
What's at stake for participating is even more minor, so much more so that's there's no comparison....
Here's a (far from comprehensive) list of revolts in France, starting from the 13th century:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_civil_unr...
And even this is so lacking (it's not even 1/100 of the documented revolts) that it manages to miss the whole Paris Commune, a huge revolt that shook France and had tons of casualties...
You have a view of history that is whatever the opposite of rose tinted glasses are.
For one thing, the inciting incidents are rarely an important part of the story. By that logic, India blew up in 1857 over unfounded rumors of their musket cartridges being greased with animal fat.
For another thing, people in the past had different values and priorities than you do and they likely found worth and pleasure in stuff that modern consumerists from a capitalist economy do not and vice-versa. You assume your value systems are universal, but this is just presentism and cultural chauvinism at work. You’re not looking at the stuff they would have found offensive, you’re focused on the stuff that motivates you. That’s not how to do any analysis.
>And you sent me a link to a 20k+ word article... TL;DR?
It’s a detailed and nuanced article that is exactly as long as it needs to be. There can be no TL;DR that doesn’t do violence to the argument. But in general, Kanye would have happily been a slave, because he’s a docile sheep who only thinks he’s empowered due to his celebrity and power, but if you took those away he’d be just like anyone else.
And also, plenty of people did rebel but they died in anonymity or had it whipped out of them. Most of the small acts of rebellion went unnoticed or stayed under the radar
Easy to say. You haven't faced much beheadings for not following the orders of the local feudal lord...
>They'd blow up only when they were literally starving (or their families were).
They'd blow up for all kinds of reasons. There were huge revolts for simple things that were considered "insulting".
The perceived threats of "irrelevance" and "uselessness" get easily diverted against other humans, especially through "othering". As jobs are taken by automation or offshoring it's easy to blame "immigrants". Keep up the social division for long enough and this can escalate to actual violence.
Amartya Sen's Nobel-prize-winning work on famine was to demonstrate that it was rarely due to an absolute shortage of food, but a deficiency in "entitlement" to it: both purely economic (not having the cash) and political (not being able to secure famine relief). That's the potential worse case of being "irrelevant and useless": starving to death because you can't get food from the "system" somehow.
Note: I'm not saying this is the same as the left/right axis, just that a lot of the horrendously dangerous material is dangerous lies being presented as fact.
(A personal example I was confronted with was watching a game-related video, where the entire sidebar was videos relating to the same game .. plus a livestream of Tommy Robinson. Why was that there? Does that imply there's a crossover between games videos and far-right videos? The system is too opaque to even tell me why it wrongly thought I would like it.)
The other side uses "othering" as well. If the right blames "immigrants" for everything, the left blames "nazis". Which would not be a bad thing, except that today you are a "nazi" if you just carry an american flag, even if you are a true Bernie supporter:
> However, as he marched with fellow progressives, he says members of Antifa saw that he was carrying an American Flag and immediately ordered him to drop the flag, calling it a "fascist symbol". When Welch refused to comply, he says they tried to rip the flag from his hands, and then hit him in the back of his head with a club that was hidden in black fabric.
The thing that makes Americans so very weird is that they are intensely paranoid. They're the most powerful and wealthiest civilization the world as ever known and yet virtually all of them are profoundly afraid. They're not just afraid of foreigners, either -- they're extremely afraid of each other. It's gotten to a point where "Stand Your Ground" laws encourage armed civilians to shoot each other the moment they feel threatened. It's difficult for outsiders to grasp. (I've even spoken to South Africans about this and even they react with disbelief.)
The paranoid style [1] at work here is well documented but I don't think people appreciate the logical conclusion. As the world grows more and more connected Americans will grow more and more paranoid. You'll quickly reach a point where America has no allies: everybody is a threat, everybody is a competitor, everybody is an enemy conspiring against them. Nobody can be trusted. America becomes supremely hostile -- to new ideas, to trade, to dissent, to change. The result, as Nietzsche explained, is a kind of supreme decadence. People withdraw from the world, they retreat into paranoid fantasy, they embrace all manner of nonsense and conspiracy, they despise knowledge, isolation and delusion feed on each other and become all consuming.
In the end it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. The paranoiac develops paranoid technologies. Technologies designed to exclude, filter, hide, deceive, surveil, punish and divide (or "decentralize"). Technologies that are all-consuming, like his own delusions, they must provide rapid and never-ending alerts about new threats and plots, the more the better. Technologies that induce paralysis by leading people deeper and deeper into simulations of reality. Technologies that primarily walls or weapons, ideally both, to protect against the greatest threat of all -- other people.
[1] https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...
Xenophobia (which is not shared by the entire population) is not specific to the states either. Do you watch European news? What's happening in China with the Uighurs? In fact, I would argue that most countries are more xenophobic if anything, they just don't have to deal with as many foreigners who want to move there and people here are actually more used to immigrants than in other places where everyone is 'the same'. In Latin America, xenophobia is gaining ground as well with the Venezuelan crisis and this is an instance where the immigrants are people of the same race/culture.
> as Nietzsche explained..
Are you sure he wasn't talking about himself?
I think the investment hypothesis is a bit more subtle than that. It goes beyond mere xenophobia into a kind of devout isolationism. What we're interested in are technologies and trends that promote loneliness. Facebook can be pressed into service for classical xenophobia, but you need Twitter -- pure rapid-fire alerts, shorn of all social context -- to really draw in the paranoiac. Youtube with its never ending flood of videos about new threats, new dangers, and new outrages, all packaged neatly into 30-minute videos. Reddit is another prime example of "anonymous networks" that provide unity through division. When evaluating technologies that might appeal to the paranoiac we're looking for whatever helps people throw up walls, makes them more mobile, lets them hide, lets them engage in only very limited contact on their own terms. We really like robots of all sorts -- not just physical bots that deliver food but highly customized algorithms that can deliver fake news and sex bots that can deliver fake love... anything that reduces or eliminates daily contact with the dreaded Other (human beings).
The problem is humanity has a tendency to pick or gravitate to morally weak specimens for leadership. We also have a tendency to "believe" authority which often leads us astray. Would a wolf pack pick a weak leader? Would a wolf pack let a weak leader remain in position once weaknesses are exposed?
It is people's fault that they become our "leaders". It is a crime that we let them remain in position.
So democracy and schooling favors tyranny? I'd like to see your working.
One could counter that a meta training algorithm could define rulesets for a alpha-like AI to self-train-upon, and at sufficient generality this would take humans out of the equation. Well, if humans are entirely removed, then the problem is no longer interesting. If humans are involved at any point in the process, we could still view AI through the lens of a human-centered tool.
What if AGI does in fact evolve its own goals as primary and decides that humans and/or human self-determination are an impediment? Would humans eventually fall down the food chain, or outside of it, say as raccoons living on the city streets? Well, I don't view the world that way. But, even if non-human life forms gain supremacy of intellect and capabilities, I would note that even raccoons have a place -- and despite the fervent desires of many a suburban homeowner, the little pests are amazingly resilient to attempts at extermination or control.
The way we use our technology is a reflection of our ideas. Since the 1990s I've watched the ideas that are popular within the culture shift in an increasingly authoritarian direction on both the "right" and "left" of the conventional political spectrum. We are seeing the ascent of strong man rule and other types of authoritarianism around the world for democratic reasons: it's what people want, or what people think we need.
I think the largest single factor is push-back against globalization. Personally I think globalization in some form and to some degree is both desirable (to prevent war and increase wealth) and inevitable (due to travel and communication), but I also think it's been pushed perhaps a little too quickly and in ways that are profoundly insensitive to the needs of the middle classes in the developed world. That's created a massive anti-globalization backlash where people are elevating strongmen and demagogues to re-assert national borders and national independence.
There are other factors too. I think a similar kind of reaction is occurring against global social liberalization.
Every technology have some inherent biases. Electricity favored decentralization about as much as steam power favored concentration.
globalization - by definition effects billions of people
genetic engineering - in 2016 GM crops, according to Wikipedia, make up 12% of global cropland
blockchain - digital time-stamping service that scales to the unfathomable rate of 7 transactions per second
It tells me the author is unable to separate wheat from chaff, as if writing this:
> Lots of mysterious terms are bandied about excitedly in ted Talks, at government think tanks, and at high-tech conferences—globalization, HDMI to VGA adapters, genetic engineering, AI, machine learning—and common people, both men and women, may well suspect that none of these terms is about them.
(since it hasn't captured much anything else)
> ...if you dislike the idea of living in a digital dictatorship or some similarly degraded form of society—then the most important contribution you can make is to find ways to prevent too much data from being concentrated in too few hands, and also find ways to keep distributed data processing more efficient than centralized data processing. These will not be easy tasks. But achieving them may be the best safeguard of democracy.
It is rather frustrating to see how illiberality and strive have come back. In the nineties, the "End of History" made for a convincing hypothesis: Market economies in functioning democracies had proven that they were capable of providing decent quality of life for everyone. Competition had moved on from natural resources to human ingenuity, rendering the supposed motivation for all the wars of history irrelevant. Contrary to orthodox left-wing opinion, poorer countries were not exploited; instead, they had a standing invite to this future of plenty, and Asia took them up on it.
But China's economic rise didn't effect any democratic change. It seemed that democracy did not, after all, win the cold war. Communism merely lost it. Dictatorships can be as productive as open societies, as long as you don't saddle them with too much incompetence or self-defeating ideology.
So we are now in this new battle of the systems, and too often, we're loosing: China and Russia are obvious. But Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines, and Poland are more recent converts to the prosperity gospel of strongman leadership. With Trump, Brexit, and several recent election results in Europe, the hits keep coming closer.
Maybe humans never actually liked democracy. They just enjoyed its spoils. Now that there's an option to both eat and hate, they're overjoyed.
Apart from the literal carve-up of colonialism, and businesses like the United Fruit Company?
Asia very much did not have a "standing invite". Japan was explicitly rebuilt. China had a number of false starts with mass death before settling on export-led state capitalism. Vietnam tried to escape colonialism and was bombed flat. Cambodia was bombed for being next to Vietnam. South Korea and Singapore are probably closest to this ideal, which both relied on the state "picking winners" for support. Philippines exports people, and was once a byword for corruption under Marcos. Indonesia .. is never in the news?
> Now that there's an option to both eat and hate, they're overjoyed.
There's a minority for whom this is very much true, unfortunately.
(WRT Russia, there's a strong case for what happened being "democracy" and "capitalism" but without rule of law, resulting in a gangster takeover)
Democracy only works if voters are competent and the vote counting process is fair. Without rule of law, you get coerced/bribed voters filling ballot boxes and criminals tallying the results.
China is a far better case for your thesis. They’re doing much better economically and the government is both totalitarian and largely accepted by the populace. This situation is also very new, since they accepted open markets at least, and it will be interesting to see how stable it really is.
China is accepted by the Han populace. The extremely non-Han parts (Tibet, Xinjiang) are having it imposed on them at gunpoint.
To see how, look at the English longbow. In it's own age it was a superweapon. It was both cheaper, could fire faster, and had better range than the crossbow. But yet, only the English ever used it. The reason why was because it was so cheap to make. But, for a person to develop the muscle mass and skill use it effectively took years of training, and once that training was in place, it could not be taken away. So that made any country that used the longbow vulnerable to peasant rebellions. So to use the longbow, England had to make the tradeoff that they had to make concessions to limited forms of democracy, or risk revolt. If your army uses crossbows, on the other hand, you can just take them away once the fighting is done.
Fast forward to Napoleonic France. Napoleon realized that liberte, egalite, and fraternite could be used as weapons. If your people are convinced that the state belongs to them, then you can arm them all. And that's exactly what France did- they created a people's army and ran roughshod over all the other countries of Europe until they eventually followed suit and also allowed forms of democracy in their own countries. They had to, or be conquered.
The age of mass democracy therefore coincides with the era of total warfare, for better or worse. We are allowed to participate in governance to the extent that our consent is required for the waging of war. But, that age is coming to an end. The development of nuclear weapons meant that there will never again be another war involving masses of infantry- so our consent is no longer required to run the country. The weapons can now be taken away, and so can democracy.
Well, that's one take anyway.
See GDPR as a solid example of trend reversal.
The intent behind GDPR certainly is good. I’m worried about the implementation though. In that respect I don’t really consider it a solid effort.
Framing the conversation as tech company winners and losers is to totally miss the point. The real question is whether GDPR will actually help stem data abuses, and frankly I don’t see how it can’t be at least a marginal net positive.
I'm concerned about the impact GDPR has on small businesses. GDPR applies to every business regardless of size. This is how it should be in a state under the rule of law, after all.
For small businesses, however, the effort required for implementing GDPR is considerably larger in relative terms than it is for larger companies. Even if you don't process any data beyond what's necessary due to legitimate interest such as for accounting purposes the effort required for properly documenting your processes and third-party data processing can be quite considerable. Larger companies already do have lawyers to deal with this. As a small business owner you usually don't.
This in itself isn't all that bad. It's mostly a one-time effort and as an added benefit it allows you to rethink and streamline your processes.
However, some aspects of GDPR have been left rather open and ambiguous in terms of how to actually implement them (sometimes intentionally so to make the regulation somewhat future-proof). Please see this earlier comment on some issues that small business owners are faced with:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17099878
Some of that ambiguity and uncertainty opens up new opportunities for the practice of sending a certain type of cease-and-desist letters that already incurs a fine at first notice (e.g. for supposedly not meeting legal requirements such as having a properly worded privacy statement on your website). This practice is rampant in some areas and industries. So far unfortunately, neither the EU nor the member states this applies to have undertaken significant steps to fight this.
What really irks me is that EU officials dismissed these concerns on several occasions. It's almost as if for them SMBs simply don't exist and the world is all about Google and Facebook.
In contrast, a not so good step is the recent partisan calls by Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, Laura Ingram, etc. to nationalize Google, Facebook, etc. because "the results are rigged against Trump", attempting to seize the power in service of a particular party currently with authoritarian tendencies, just as TFA warned. That said, I doubt this will get far soon.
Firstly, I feel everyone gets something wrong about AI and jobs, and I believe that makes things a little less dire on that front than you may otherwise believe. Namely, people are not purely 'rational' economic actors, and don't purely make decisions on 'quality' or 'price'.
For instance, art and media isn't all about what's the 'best' work out there, but the one with name recognition, sentimental value, an existing fandom, etc. It doesn't matter if an AI can create 'art', because whether that art sells depends on more than technical competence. Will Mario or Star Wars or Lord of the Rings be threatened by AI and technology? Probably not, the name sells regardless of whether a competitor product/brand may be objectively better.
So I believe artistic and creative fields may be the thing remaining after AI takes most other jobs, since your creativity can make a market that competitors legally can't compete in. If all fails, a personal brand can do much the same way. Sell yourself, not the 'product'.
There's also the fact many 'worse' businesses still do well either through word of mouth, location, advertising, etc. Not everything will be a one horse race ala Uber or Airbnb, and whether AI/tech/whatever can outperform humans won't really matter than much regardless. In that sense, things aren't quite as dire as some people would have you believe.
Secondly, while technology and AI may help those in power consolidate it further, it also democraticises power too, by making the means of getting it available to more people than ever before.
For example, for as much as emotional manipulation and fake news is pointed out as an issue online, the internet has also made it easier to verify anything, to get around government censorship and to make your own mind up about current events and the situation at hand. If the old school media got things wrong (or were told to shut up by those in power), what could you do? How could you disprove their claims?
With great difficulty that's how. But now we've got a world when anyone can call out anyone, where finding alternative viewpoints on major topics is trivial and where doing research on advanced topics is easier than ever. Narratives have been destroyed, official statements disproved by average Joes taking photos and recording videos, and pseudoscience has been debunked. Is that really worse than a world where publishing information is tightly controlled and regulated?
Technology can be used for the purposes of tyranny, but it can also be used to fight against it just as well. And that'll only get more true when more aspects of everyday life involve computers and networking.
So while technology may 'favour' tyranny, in some ways it also favours democracy and a more equal society too.
Well duh. First of all, get that out of the way. You are irrelevant, the universe at a greater scale indeed doesn't even hint a proper damn about you. I'm more concerned with all those snowflakes out there losing touch with reality insisting that they are who is relevant when in fact any attention you give them whatsoever is a waste of time, and stolen from you and just not worth it.
I've about had it with this civilization, and phrasings like that... oh look, technology enables a new kind of totalitarianism. Yeah. Well. If that's what you make of it, fine. Of course it doesn't need to be that way, but now that you said it out loud, it'll become more true among your kin.
I'll just stay in my little bubble that thinks technology can help increasing the awesomeness in everyone's life, at least this 300 foot pole away from your orwellian dystopias - far enough for government work.
Also, for someone who says "I don't think that's to say I shouldn't be worried about it", you sure seem to take a liberal - maybe even a bit contradicting? - stance not wanting to be too idealistic about it.
There was a case once where a software project amended the GNU GPL with a no military use clause... On that note, you can never tell exactly who your customers are, and you shouldn't fit technology with a built-in kill switch or have it call home, which is just the worst of all options, as seen with several unpopular videogame companies.
I thought reddit was great until I saw the monetization of speech push discussion in a different direction: first with corporate astroturfing, then by paying people to conduct psyops.
I thought Facebook was pretty great until I realized that anything I post there is visible by people who I might not want to see it- I think of the uncles who unironically post about how "monkey is suddenly a racist word", but also "influential people saw this post that I made five years ago that might have been funny five years ago but definitely isn't now" (read: James Gunn).
I thought Instagram was pretty cool until adverts and the realization that you only see the positives of people's lives through the filter they operate, and that it affected how I felt about myself!
This isn't to say that everything we're producing is bad. We now have cheap, readily available sources of reliable knowledge that update quickly (encyclopedias take a year and were pretty pricey, by comparison). I also think functions like online banking and simple government actions (think re-registering your car) seriously extend our ability to operate in society.
But I'm finding that the honeymoon phase of the next big internet product is all too sweet- The first six months is generally okay, then we find a few edge cases of malice, followed by the real underbelly as bad actors take over the platform.