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Technology May Be Responsible for Society's Downfall

Author: Cameron Hilditch
Date: 2023
From: Gale Opposing Viewpoints Online Collection
Publisher: Gale, part of Cengage Group
Document Type: Viewpoint essay
Length: 1,807 words
Content Level: (Level 5)
Lexile Measure: 1380L

Full Text:
Article Commentary
"Having left us collectively estranged from intractable reality, technology has conditioned each of us to select the information that
best suits our desires."
Cameron Hilditch is a former fellow at the National Review Institute, a conservative think tank headquartered in New York City. In the
following viewpoint, Hilditch argues that technology has spiraled out of human control and may destroy society. The author suggests
that, as both conservatives and liberals spend more time online, they become angrier and less tolerant of information that challenges
their convictions. Hilditch asserts that technology has allowed people to shape their own realities according to their needs and
desires instead of confronting a world that is indifferent to their struggles. The author notes that, beginning with primitive weapons
and shelter, humans have used technology to outmaneuver nature. Hilditch contends that virtual reality, in which people do not have
to confront anything outside of their own desires, will be the defining culture war of the twenty-first century.

As you read, consider the following questions:

1. Why do you think the author highlights Chamath Palihapitiya's comments about dopamine-driven feedback loops?
2. Do you agree with the author's contention that people have become less likely to confront realities that contradict their own
viewpoints and desires? Why or why not?
3. In your opinion, what technological solutions, if any, could result in less political polarization? Explain your answer.

As the 21st century progresses, the conflict between Left and Right will fade into relative insignificance in comparison with the conflict
between man and machine.

You don't have to envision the emergence of SkyNet or some other form of futuristic A.I. ripped from the pages of a science-fiction
novel to see how this is going to work. The technological disassembly of the human spirit is already at an advanced stage in the
West, as a cursory glance at our politics makes clear.

A curious symmetry between the most online contingents of the Left and the Right has emerged over recent years. The more time
any given conservative or progressive partisan spends immersed in media whether social or traditional the more those
partisans tend to resemble one another in certain key respects. They become febrile, wounded, and enraged when confronted with
facts that challenge their convictions in even minor ways. Their sensitivity to the moral complexity of life is numbed to the point at
which Good/Evil and Republican/Democrat (or Democrat/Republican) correspond in a strict 1:1 ratio. The wells of self-pity and
grievance from which they draw the conscience-quenching waters of woe-is-me victimhood appear increasingly bottomless
(https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/book-review-the-coddling-of-the-american-mind-snowflake-students/).

The Technological Revolution

Some conservatives are in the habit of skewering progressives who engage in this wallowing as "snowflakes," but the past two
months have shown definitively that the blizzard is a bipartisan one. The willingness with which Donald Trump's most devoted
supporters have embraced utter delusion rivals (and in some cases surpasses) anything of a similar sort we've seen on the left
(https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-right-wing-outlets-that-told-trump-supporters-what-they-wanted-to-hear/).

The people who've been driven to distraction by their own media engagement are victims, in a sense, though not of dark money or of
Dominion voting systems. To understand why this is the case, we really have to understand the technological revolution that took
place during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Technology allows human beings to shape reality in such a way that it conforms to their own needs and desires. This is probably the
most basic and generally applicable definition of the word that has held true over the centuries. Our primal ancestors were confronted
everywhere and at all times by the basic indifference of the world to their own existence. Hunger, thirst, heat, cold, pain, and disease
all taught them that nature doesn't often conform itself to the needs and desires of Homo sapiens. Starting with the spear and the
shelter, technology emerged as a method of taming, cajoling, and coercing nature to bend to the will of mankind, and so our task
continued for millennia.

During the agricultural revolution, we discovered techniques that allowed us to make the earth's yield serve our needs, and
something like civilization was born. But from that time until the 18th century, progress was slow and uneven. Every man, woman,
and child ran into the brutal indifference of reality to their own appetites and aspirations at almost every moment of the day.

The industrial revolution changed all that. A combination of free markets, cheap energy, and a population boom led to a quantum leap
in technological advance. We seemed to accomplish more shaping the world to suit us with each passing decade than we had
in the previous 10,000 years.

The long-term social effects of the industrial revolution, and the civilization it brought forth, were investigated by one of the most
important 20th-century thinkers, Jacques Ellul, in his book The Technological Society (published in French in 1954). Ellul believed
that technology (which he included under the broader term technique) was the dominant ideology of the modern age, encompassing
both capitalism and communism. The project of this ideology is essentially to replace nature with technology, so that human beings
no longer have to bump up against any intractably resistant reality that might hamper the fulfillment of their desires. The ultimate
symbol of this phenomenon, for Ellul, is the modern city.

The way in which free markets feed into this phenomenon is obvious. The profit motive is constantly supplying us with more and more
efficient machines that are easier and easier to interface with. Communists are after the same thing, even though they favor a very
different way of getting there (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/give-us-fully-automated-luxury-
communism/592099/). Ellul observes that "all parties, whether revolutionary or conservative, liberal or socialist, of the Right or the
Left, agree to preserve" the supremacy of technology as the engine of civilization.

It's easy to confirm this evolving relationship between nature and human desire in everyday experience. Whereas once our species
had to overcome considerable resistance from the natural world in order to warm ourselves in cold climates, now most of us have
only to press a button on the thermostat. As our ability to conform reality to our own wants increases, our need to conform ourselves
to intractable realities decreases. Sheer lack of practice has rendered us more and more incapable of reconciling ourselves to things
we don't like. In fact, the very existence of difficult realities with which we have to deal is something of an affront to the technological
society.

Tracing the various social consequences of the technological advances made during the 19th and 20th centuries would be a long
endeavor; what concerns us at present is the advent of information technology in our own day. The Internet has allowed us to
subjugate information to our own desires much in the same way that older technologies allowed us to master the elements. In his
day, Ellul saw this coming in the form of state propaganda:

The passions it provokes which exist in everybody are amplified. The suppression of the critical faculty man's growing
incapacity to distinguish truth from falsehood, the individual from the collectivity, action from talk, reality from statistics, and so
on is one of the most evident results of the technical power of propaganda.

Swap out "propaganda" for "the Internet," and these words fit our own moment like a glove.

Virtual Reality
If information technology follows the same pattern of development as did previous technologies (and we have no reason to assume
otherwise), we are headed toward a very dark place. As noted above, the basic promise of technology lies in its ability to shape
reality in order to better suit our desires. But what happens when this promise is made about information? If our technology allows us
to filter and control the information that gets to us so that it always conforms to our own desires, what hope have we of sharing a
common experience of reality, which is surely a prerequisite of republican government? How do we reconcile the basic project of
modernity the replacement of nature with technology with liberty? Ellul thought it impossible: "The idea of effecting
decentralization while maintaining technical progress is purely utopian."

The salient feature of the pre-technological world was its indiscriminateness. With our limited ability to shape the world to our
individual desires, we were forced to confront the world's indifference to meet shared needs, such as the need for food and shelter.
The ethic of the pre-modern world was defined by conforming oneself to a pre-existent reality. Technology turns this ethic upside
down, and information technology reinforces this inversion. A kaleidoscope of viewpoints on any and every conceivable topic is
available on the Internet. Having left us collectively estranged from intractable reality, technology has conditioned each of us to select
the information that best suits our desires. And so we follow the logic of technology through to its conclusion. Tech-immersed
partisans are increasingly reluctant to confront the features of political reality that are resistant to their own desires. As a
consequence, reality is less and less likely to penetrate the layers of self-serving, reality-curating technology with which they wrap
themselves.

The endpoint of all this, as Bruno Maçaes intimates in his recent book, History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America, is virtual
reality: a technological end-state in which no individual has to confront anything contrary to his own desires. The emergence of this
kind of technology, and religious opposition to it, is likely to be the defining culture war of this century.

Some of Ellul's early readers saw this coming. John Wilkinson, who first translated The Technological Society into English in 1964,
heard of the book through his colleague at the University of California, Aldous Huxley. Huxley thought Ellul's book an admirable
analysis of the themes he himself had previously explored in Brave New World.

None of this should be taken to mean that technology, in and of itself, is something bad. What's troubling is that technological
development has now spiraled out of human control. Each of us marches to the beat of technological advance: We are its servants
rather than its masters. The real problem with technology is that "it has become a reality in itself," as Ellul observed. "It is no longer
merely a means and an intermediary. It is an object in itself, an independent reality with which we must reckon." Chamath
Palihapitiya, the former Facebook exec, admitted as much: "The short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created
are destroying how society works (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/11/facebook-former-executive-ripping-society-
apart)."

Our collective "liberation" from the intractable and indifferent realities of the world is being ceaselessly spun out by our devices and
their algorithms. This process is plunging many of us into a kind of political solipsism, whereby we're increasingly intolerant of any
state of affairs that doesn't express and execute our own desires. The English poet Charles Williams warned that "when the means
are autonomous, they are deadly." How we can pull ourselves out of this tech-driven death spiral isn't at all clear.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2023 Gale, part of Cengage Group

Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition)
Hilditch, Cameron. "Technology May Be Responsible for Society's Downfall." Gale Opposing Viewpoints Online Collection, Gale,
2023. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints,
link.gale.com/apps/doc/LYBPZR706497327/OVIC?u=mag_c_magn0126&sid=bookmark-OVIC&xid=daf3b78d. Accessed 3 Oct.
2023. Originally published as "Technology Will Destroy Us," National Review, 23 Jan. 2021.
Gale Document Number: GALE|LYBPZR706497327