Technology Lessons

We live near an airfield. Daedalus. The story of Icarus is a technology lesson. Jurassic Park, too.

Ours is a time when technology is presented as a solution for many of our problems, and the people who lead tech companies are afforded an obscene degree of awe and admiration. But at what cost?

The notion that technology is inherently good is undercut significantly by two issues: firstly, capitalism ensures that the principal aim of new developments is not to effect a universal human or environmental good but rather to maximise profit; secondly, the resources required to research, produce, and implement these technological solutions are so substantial that they will always be dependent upon the embrace and therefore ownership and control of the technology by the state or wealthy private individuals.

The status afforded to tech leaders is, by transference, not about their brilliant minds or the wondrous things they have created. It is instead a fetishisation of wealth and power.

Worse, as an extension of these impediments to technological good, those with control seek to bend new technology toward solidification of the status quo. For all the talk about disruption, Uber is nothing more than a deregulated erasure of labour rights. But there’s an app! And it’s cheap! And convenient! Facial recognition technology is unreliable, but already being deployed to strip away the freedom to simply exist in time and space.

Research has shown that Facebook has been used to manipulate voters, stifle dissidents, and facilitate genocide. Huge amounts of spending on Facebook ads have influenced election and voting outcomes already. Wargames seems a quaint and relatively benign world, now.

Shall we play a game?

Imagine you had £100 million to spend on a campaign, and you used that almost entirely to direct people to a website.

On that website, you gathered as much data as possible about each visitor, linking them with existing profiles.

Then, you used that information to direct targeted Facebook ads. In some districts you try to discourage people from voting. Elsewhere you want higher turnout from select demographic profiles. In other districts, you don’t stand any real prospect of winning, but you could perhaps fracture support for one alternative, tilting the vote to a less threatening third option.

The result of the campaign would be an illusory representation of genuine public will, shifted in your preferred direction artificially. A ghost mandate for whatever your agenda might be.

Wax wings and dinosaurs. Technology lessons from which we have still failed to learn.