In Ursula K Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” the quality of life for an entire society comes from focusing all the pain upon a single child that horrifically bares it all for the common good. Le Guin puts forth two possible reactions by the people of the society to this reality: Acceptance that, while horrible, it is an atrocity that is necessary for the society’s happiness; and revulsion, to the point that people leave Omelas and never return.
With the re-election of Trump spurred on by technocratic oligarchs, people are starting to have “Omelas moments” with tech. Maybe it’s Elon Musk’s free-speech-for-me-but-not-for-thee takeover of what was a flawed but vibrant Twitter community. Maybe it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s “more masculine energy” rants as he undid Facebook moderation policies and did away with diversity initiatives that underpinned Meta’s growth. Maybe it’s seeing Peter Thiel, the man who was using the blood of young people as some sort of anti-aging therapy like some vampire, push the accelerationist view of the bro-ligarchs taking over the world.
Maybe it’s just all the layoffs, and the crushing workloads foisted on those remaining while they are stripped of agency and options.
Maybe it’s watching all this data collected by these bro-ligarchs become the crude oil that powers advertising and AI, only it’s not just environmental pollution but a different sort degrading everything about society and how we function.
And maybe… maybe it’s what happens when unfettered capitalism meets “maximizing shareholder value” and the supposed benefits of the internet future we were promised have turned into an increasingly dystopian society (with income inequality to rival pre-revolution France.)
And more and more people are walking away from the tech industry. It’s been bleeding, slowly, for years, but of late it feels like more and more people see the kid in pain that drives the tech world.
It’s hard, of course, to walk away. It’s made some people wealthy, it’s evened out inequalities in information and social status, and it’s been the underlying organizing power of so many movements that the governments of the world work to control the information out there.
Some will, of course, continue to accept the price of the economic, political, social, and environmental atrocities that allow them to afford rent and food. Some will try to rationalize it all. “For the revolution to happen, we need people to suffer,” they tell themselves. “Surely we can do crypto and AI in a less environmentally destructive way. Maybe, just maybe, the ‘invisible hand of the market’ will lead to changes.”
Are they fools? Perhaps. It’s hard to fault their rationalizing given the alternatives they can see. Protest doesn’t pay the mortgage, after all.
Decades ago blue_beetle on Metafilter summed up the internet age: “If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” Only now, in a future where everything is subscription and the very idea of owning anything is anathema to these tech companies, it doesn’t matter if we’re paying for it or not; we’re the product either way.
It makes you wonder if the product is about making us the tortured child for the enrichment of a society we think we are part of as a true beneficiary. If so, it’s no wonder we don’t wonder about it — it’s far too dark a thought for an already dark time.