At my age, I have lived through the rise of the internet, the dotcom bubble, and now I am living through the AI hallucination. This is a more appropriate name because imagining realities that run on resources that people lack has been a favorite plan of the tech world since the rise of commercially-available internet access. However, I have noticed that there has been no deviation from a pattern in technology development: the same kind of person–white man raised in the suburbs–seems to keep getting rich while everyone else is forced to lavish such individuals with attention and praise. My thought is that if the same thing keeps happening in every tech boom, the problem is the players and who is offered success, not necessarily societal advancement. Emotionally stunted misanthropes who get off on pretending that they are confused about how the world works should not be considered symbols of “innovation.”
Remember when being a “nerd” was about being smart and analytically approaching problems? Now, it seems that being a “nerd” is about being the skinny white boy that girls ignored, instead of being socially awkward but intellectually skilled. So many of these white suburbanites spend their time demanding sympathy for being seen as a “nerd” without recognizing that their demands have racialized and gender-assigned intelligence, rather than creating a more collaborative environment. As someone born in the 1980s, this is the complete and total opposite goal of Star Trek and Star Wars, which–though created by suburbanite white men–were about intelligent people all over the universe who all looked different. These days, there are several people who would gratefully be called “nerds” if it meant something other than ostracization by, mainly, suburban white men.
Moreover, the circular investment of technology has meant that even bad ideas get funded to increase the hype around untested theories and premises. Not many people remember, but there was a literal child who was given $200 million to test the idea of a system designed to rid the ocean of plastic. Sure, some of the cleanup has happened, but nowhere close to the scale discussed, and there are plenty of other people who have never been given that kind of faith. At the other end of the spectrum, inventors and thinkers of color get relegated to being people who “speak well” and “have so much potential,” failing while others take credit for their efforts. Simply put, if the same people hoard resources and only distribute to those who look like them, there is no scientific basis to technological advancement. That is simply the dominant narrative awarding itself for existing.
In history, there were probably times when technology had solved problems, but that was always close to the beginning of a breakthrough. As learned with the cotton gin and the computer, every “advance” fails to relieve human beings of the need to work ourselves into the ground because people who own the technology are insatiable. Often, the people who are consistently exploited are not white, and are women, which the world has decided is acceptable collateral damage. Nothing except further exploitation has come with the rise of the technical age, and no one can point to consistent examples of positive reinforcement. Money is the only goal, and if people with money are denied their ice cream, people will suffer until they are happy again. Technology stopped solving problems because when the same people fail to make money, they withhold the technology. So many have barriers in front of life-saving services because people with money run technology, and everyone else has to watch in awe–or simply die for “the cause.”
Elon Musk, i.e. the Coup Facilitator, is not opening a branch of his companies in South Africa because he would be required to eschew his bigotry for the native African populations, and he is incapable of doing that. Despite being the richest man in the world, he cannot abide by the premise that someone other than white men deserve anything for the rise in tech. He serves as an example for people all over the world, and more men than not are following his example. A field where people constantly need their egos stroked and their resources hoarded have nothing to offer the rest of the world.
Chasing A Dying Empire 