Who is This "We", Man?
[A version of this article has been published by Cumhuriyet, the oldest newspaper in Turkey! You can find it in Turkish here: ‘Biz’in içerisinde ben de var mıyım?]
As far as I can tell, we all oscillate between extreme feelings around modern technology. We go from spending 4 hours on Instagram a day to deleting the app and going on a no-screen diet, and then back. It’s especially peculiar around me, because I hang out with a lot of people (myself included) that work FOR the companies that build the products that we feel so much bipolarity around. It seems like we understand on the surface that these developments are positive for humanity, but we have this gnawing feeling that it’s somehow terrible, too. Whenever I think about technology critically, I somehow find myself quoting an episode of Black Mirror. So that is what I will do. I will give you spoilers for a 2016 episode of Black Mirror, named Men Against Fire.
In this episode, we see a technologically advanced US army fighting against an alien infestation. The soldiers are given directives to use virtually unlimited force, because unless they can control the infestation, the aliens will take over. We root for the soldiers (or at least I did), mainly because the aliens look terrible. Halfway through the episode (and this is the spoiler), we realize that the soldiers are wearing Augmented Reality neural implants that change the shapes of certain objects. Specifically, it turns out that what we and the soldiers perceived to be aliens were actually international refuges, hiding away from law enforcement to seek asylum in the United States.
The episode in general is amazing, but the most fucked up part is that we find ourselves rooting for the soldiers for the first half of the episode. We buy into the idea that the aliens will take over our territory unless we expunge them. When we realize the aliens were actually just “illegal aliens”, we feel horrible. As I understand it, this is the main idea of the episode: The ethics of technology depends completely on what application it is used for. Life would be much simpler if we could blindly believe that advancements in technology automatically lead to a fairer society, but in reality, they can just as easily be used for more exclusion. And when technology hides exclusion from plain view, it becomes that much harder to call it out and fight it.
So maybe, this is what fuels our ambivalence concerning technology, at least partially. When we help build a technology, or read about the next software revolution (think Chat GPT), the optimistic parts of our brains say that we are creating the possibility of a better world. However, when we are consumers of the same technology, the cynical parts of our brains take over and start asking annoying questions: Are we also creating the possibility of a scarier world? Are we just data points for AI to be trained on for some nefarious purpose? Why can’t we seem to drop our daily Screen Time below 4 hours? Suddenly, “we the creators” becomes “we the consumers”. We feel excluded from the narrative that we are helping create.
So here is the “weird relationship” that breaks my brain. I love technology! I love Wikipedia; I love YouTube, and I love my big tech company that allows me to live a comfortable life. And I love watching Black Mirror. But I love watching it precisely because it shows me how terrible modern technology can be. Should I really root for a product of modern technology that tells me how bad modern technology is? Aren’t I then supporting Netflix, big entertainment, the attention economy, etc? It’s like the producers of Black Mirror are screaming “it’s doomsday!”, but they are broadcasting it on the doomsday device. Sometimes I feel like the only way I could be happy is if I became a writer for the show. Or maybe then I’d be the most depressed, who knows. To be completely honest, I wrote a version of this essay for an Oxford grad school application, and I didn’t get in. So I guess you should just ignore these as the mad ramblings of an Oxford reject.
[This article was inspired by Slavoj Zizek’s book: Like a Thief in Broad daylight. It is an awesome book that talks about how the nature of power changed as our political system moved away from powerful people to powerful machines.]