Where is it all headed?

OpenAI recently announced that it had purchased Jony Ive’s hardware design company for $6.5 billion. OpenAI wants to make the next generation of AI-enabled wearable or portable devices, and partnering with Ive was a bold move in that direction.  The message in the marketing was clear: we are all supposed to be overjoyed by this news. After all, Ive's design resume includes the iPod, iMac, and iPhone. The partnership is a marriage of geniuses, correct? Shouldn't we be salivating at the opportunity to drop a grand for whatever slick new consumer product they cook up? 

My reaction was swift and visceral. There has been enough disruption in the past 25 years, enough change foisted upon me and many others, much of it driven by new technology that simply emerged in our midst, like alien spaceships over Manhattan or the genetically engineered return of the Mastodon. I don’t need this device, whatever it is. I didn’t need half of the other digital devices I’ve owned either. They were more like toys than tools, and they ended up like most toys, rotting in a landfill or forgotten in a closet.

I have always been fascinated by new technology, but lately, I no longer feel obligated to keep up. Age partly explains my disenfranchisement (I just turned sixty), but there is more to it. Lately, I wonder, when will the parade of novelty end? How many new kinds of devices and new releases of old devices and apps and updates of apps do I need to be a happy, fulfilled person?

Our technology revolution feels like a gargantuan, messy, unfinished project, a never-ending beta test. It is exhausting.

We keep using the word "revolution" to describe our technological moment, but real revolutions have a point, a clearly defined purpose for all the disruption. The political revolution can be condensed down to a handful of slogans, but no such rhetorical or ideological clarity can be found in the tech revolution, which seems more like a continuation of America’s obsession with consumer products and entertainment than an uprising against an oppressive status quo. For example, what was the higher purpose lurking behind the successive rollouts of the iPhone, the iPad, and iWatch? Wouldn't just one of those devices, the first one, have sufficed as an instrument of technology revolution? And the social media apps. Shouldn’t one app that hacks your brain chemistry and rewrites the rules of society have been enough for any of us? I am thinking this as I toggle between my Facebook, Bluesky, and LinkedIn feeds feeling overwhelmed and assaulted and wondering, is this what progress looks like?

My Facebook feed is the perfect metonym for this rudderless tech revolution. I find myself scrolling without purpose through a volume of information that would have choked my grandparents. Much of it is designed to keep me engaged for a few seconds more than I might have otherwise--increasingly bizarre third-party content and assorted ephemera from the lives of my 500 friends served up to me as entertainment. Much of it is inane, like the obviously AI-generated images of Bruce Springsteen performing for Bob Dylan's 84th birthday party. Most of it is false or exaggerated or dripping with sentimentality, nostalgia, and rage. Sometimes I lose myself in the stream and then come up for air wondering, what the hell was I just doing? This is the social ecosystem that is gradually eclipsing the one that existed before, the one I was raised in.

What is the point of this feed? If I were to imagine my feed as a highway, where is it headed? More accurately, where is it taking me, because with all of this algorithmic power being aimed at my brain, I am not a free agent navigating on this road. I am certainly not headed in the direction of enlightenment or even some small measure of self-improvement. What revelation or big step forward is possible in this miasma of advertising, self-aggrandizement, and AI slop?

What is the point of all this computer power in the palm of my hand?

My question is brimming with assumptions that people from Western societies often make. It is premised on the idea that there should be an evolution embedded in history, culture, and society, a teleology. Our teleological bias derives partially from the Judeo-Christian influence, which gave Western society a linear sense of time, with a beginning, middle, and end. History is supposed to follow a narrative arc, with a divine hand guiding it. Later, the Enlightenment left us with the sense that history is progressive, following a trajectory that will eventually culminate in a more just, equal, rationalistic world. 

Even as I ask the question, I know that mass societies do not decide to do much of anything. They function more like simple life forms than a town meeting. Herbert Spencer’s “social organism,” the hive, the ant colony, the ecosystem, Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome from A Thousand Plateaus—they all have served as metaphors for the decentralized, automatic functionality of mass society. There is no long-term social purpose possible for technology in a system this big.

America’s tech entrepreneurs are deeply invested in the progress narrative, and they often depict the social forces that drive technological development as inevitable and overwhelming. Former Google executive Ray Kurzweil wrote in 2004 “The 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate.” Not to be outdone for enthusiasm, Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired Magazine, wrote “Technology is a means of accelerating evolution.” Nicholas Negroponte, founding director of the MIT Media Lab wrote, “like a force of nature, the digital age cannot be denied or stopped.”

This is the techno-utopian gospel: Change is coming. You can't stop it, and it would be foolish to try. You have no choice but to get with the program (our program) and reap the whirlwind. There is a better future waiting over the horizon, thanks to technology.

American tech leaders also present their work as sanitized, orderly, and rational. Apple’s product design and marketing is a master class in minimalism and aesthetic purity, with white backgrounds, clean lines, and ergonomic perfectionism. Google promises to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Amazon’s PR videos depict its warehouses as centers of high-tech, precision-timed automation. But underneath this shiny facade, the old dirty wheel of extractionist capitalism continues to turn, strip-mining minerals, exploiting workers, and pumping carbon into the atmosphere. Order is an illusion; scratch the surface and you will find an unprincipled, unplanned, unregulated gold rush underway, a mad dash for profit cloaked in techno-idealism.

I prefer to be realistic about our current technological moment. There was no point, no direction, no grand trajectory linking together the various computer devices we have all owned over the past three decades, and there are no guarantees that it will end well, despite the utopian dreaming of our technology elites. There is no story of progress to be read in the progressively more powerful computer chips that embedded themselves in my life. There were no clearly defined moral or political objectives underlying the tech revolution, even as it was radically disrupting the way we work, socialize, communicate, and think. In the absence of any guiding principles, the base instincts of capitalism took over. Monetization, scale, speed, and efficiency have been the drivers of technological change in my lifetime. 

Americans want to believe that our technology will ultimately make us better individuals, and elevate society. It's embedded in our cultural DNA to believe in a brighter future. Remove that article of faith, and the entire towering edifice of devices threatens to collapse on us.