A Dehumanizing Alignment
Dehumanization is a shared habit between two political worlds we now see as aligned
The excitement we all felt when we first encountered the Internet was palpable. It felt like a magical communications medium in an era where the postal system and fax machines ruled. The promise of new connections and a more intimate world with less strife seemed plausible.
My first experience involved communicating with a physician in Antarctica who was taking CME exams using a system I’d helped create. She took all the exams, and emailed to ask when more were coming. The system was a lifeline for her, and emailing with her made us feel closer.
Today, the magic is gone, social isolation has been increasing for years, and the fact that the Internet came from DARPA seems more like a dark harbinger because what we assumed would lead to freedom and stronger democracies has become a playground for power-hungry authoritarians and monopolists.
Worse, the Internet has become dehumanizing.
A recent episode of the “Tech Won’t Save Us” podcast reviewing the book Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology delved into this and other issues I covered recently based on this important, posthumous David Golumbia work.
- Golumbia also wrote an increasingly legendary post in 2022 entitled, “ChatGPT Should Not Exist — It Isn’t Just Bias and Threats to Creative Livelihoods. Generative AI Is Built on Nihilism. Its Real Product Is Despair.”
The interviewee in the “Tech Won’t Save Us” podcast — Chris Gilliard, a community college professor raised in Detroit — was a close friend of Golumbia’s, and a collaborator in critiquing what they termed “luxury surveillance,” which is surveillance people pay for and whose tracking, monitoring, and quantification features are understood by the user as benefits. From Ring doorbells to AI bird feeders to sleep monitoring rings to smartwatches, it’s an entire ecosystem uploading videos, biometrics, and more into tech company data centers.
Gilliard has worried about the surveillance state being created by Silicon Valley, and is more concerned than ever now that Big Tech and an authoritarian-leaning US Administration seem to be in overt alignment, with dehumanization uniting them.
But first, to the politics of Silicon Valley, which some still find hard to accept. Gilliard defines “cyberlibertarianism” as: