"Hey, Google, use every discernible iota of my personal information to build the foundation of a Chinese-style, authoritarian, digital dystopia, because I'm too lazy to learn basic, self-managed organizational skills."
Given that a Butlerian Jihad seems unlikely, what are our options? If we can't stop it, maybe we need to keep pace with it instead. If this is a Red Queen Race, then we need to give people the tools needed to compete.
I think it's mostly an emergent phenomena enslaving everyone into some cultural and behavioral paradigm that nobody intends or particularly wants.
But the costs of shutting down all these incentivizing/nudging/conditioning/addicting technologies would kill most of the tech sector (by market cap), and therefore can't be seriously entertained.
So the industry is too big to fail?
I couldn't care less if predatory companies collapse. None of the tech itself is inherently evil, its only being used against us instead of working for us. If google were disbanded or broken up today new companies would rise up continue to do what they do now under more responsible terms. Those companies can continue to provide cell phones and email accounts without using those things to build dossiers on the people who just want to communicate with friends and family.
Many people today think it's impossible to offer anything if you aren't abusing your users because that's all they know, but I remember when there were hundreds of free email providers long before it became technically feasible to read every last email stored on the server to spy on users.
I think that's a naive position to take. People are people, and human nature really is hard to fight. It's a virtual certainty that anything replacing google, will be violating your security and privacy. Especially if it's "free".
Companies are amoral monsters who care about nothing but making money and there will always be a struggle with regulation followed by deregulation followed by more regulation as people push back against abuse, but that cycle has kept things in relative order. Companies have gotten very good at inserting themselves into government, directly and indirectly, to stand in the way and prevent the people from keeping them in line, but I don't think it's entirely hopeless yet.
People care, they do, but the feedback loop from shiny feature to creeping authoritarianism is too long for monkey brains to grasp. What you call lazy, I call dopamine. You can't expect us naked apes to just ignore that hit. Change the game instead.
It's easy to blame it on "people". But if we put ourselves in a situation where we rely on us fallible beings swimming upstream day after day, on snowflakes feeling responsible for the avalanche, do we then really have anyone to blame but ourselves?
The players can't have a say on the rulings, and the refs shouldn't have an opinion on the winners. In other words, you're either in the game, or out, but never both.
I imagine a world where there's a very clear delineation between people who are currently in and currently out. When you're in, you go with the flow. You follow your heart, sing, dance, try to be happy, be creative. And when you're out, that shits a no go. You remember what it was like to be emotional, you empathize, but decisions must be strictly non-impulsive.
People take turns going from one side to the other. Too long on either side and you'd lose sight, ruin the game.
It's also kind of analogous to trip-sitters.
Bruce Sterling called that group "Zen Serotonin" in his novel Schismatreix[1] about posthuman ideologies. They enforced their "strictly non-impulsive" zen-like calm with biomonitor-regulated sci-fi drugs. They advocated strongly for social order and slowing the rate of social change.
My username ("pdkl95") is based on the opposite ideology. It is another sci-fi drug from Schismatrix, used by another ideological faction to force (often destructively, as brain damage) a change in perspective; it forces someone out of the comfortably familiar paradigm that Zen Serotonin tried to maintain.
This "clear delineation" between groups will eventually happen. All species eventually fracture into separate daughter-species. Instead of finding different ecological niches, human will speciate into different ideological niches.
“The best leaders are those the people hardly know exist.
The next best is a leader who is loved and praised.
Next comes the one who is feared.
The worst one is the leader that is despised.
If you don't trust the people,
they will become untrustworthy.
The best leaders value their words, and use them sparingly.
When she has accomplished her task,
the people say, "Amazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!"I bring these two up because: 1. Saying 1940's Nazis are monsters exemplifies a lack of empathy. They did monstrous things, no doubt, but the vast majority of the army was young men, doing a duty, during a depression, while under one of the first and strongest propaganda campaigns ever. They as people were very little different than us now. It's a prime example of how the road to hell can be paved with good intentions.
2. The way that every single time anyone implicates to even the slightest degree that maybe powerful people might be smart enough to do something subversive and tricky, people jump over each-other trying to be the first to make a tin-foil hat joke... that shit is annoying.
In conclusion, a society which managed to miss the whole "empathy" message of WW2 and actively undermines any attempt to pass blame towards the people in power is being extremely irresponsible, and the odds of things going badly are stacked against.