Possibilities

I went to an all inclusive holiday resort for the first time ever over Easter. I can see why people like it, you don’t have to think about anything apart from “do I want a drink” and “what time is dinner?” I guess that is relaxing, although after a few days I found it quite limiting and almost unnerving. I didn’t have to think about where my next meal was coming from because I knew, but equally I had barely any agency in the situation. I could only eat what was presented to me (which was admittedly largely quite nice) at the times when it was available. Equally I could go to the pool whenever I liked, as long as it was within the times specified. I’m not sure I’ve had to conform to that many rules since I left school. Towards the end of our stay, we broke out and went to explore the city. It was my first time in Marrakesh, but in the resort I could have been anywhere. Indeed if global heating means UK summers like the one we’re currently having, we might as well build a load of these resorts here and save the air fare.

An odd thing happened to me about halfway through the stay. I was sat in the dining room taking a break from my buffet lunch and looking around the room, I suddenly had a vision of it abandoned, empty and reclaimed by the desert. I could see where the sand would pile up around the pillars and against the walls with their (then) faded decorations. Once I had seen this it was hard to unsee. Everywhere in the resort I could see it in some future state of abandon and decay, a post-apocalyptic vision that somehow seemed inevitable.

I was reminded of this the other day when I saw a poster in a tube station for one of the big holiday firms showing a picture of a couple floating in giant pool surrounded by beach huts and palm trees. Judging by the number of ‘x’s and ‘c’s in the name, the resort was probably in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, most likely in or around Cancun or Playa del Carmen. I went to that part of the world ten years ago, staying mainly in Tulum, which in those days was a sleepy backpacking resort town with a couple of high end eco-resorts down one end of the beach. It was eminently instagrammable authentic Yucatan beach life for hipster-adjacent dickheads like me, but it was also supposed to be subject to strict rules that were designed to sustain the natural ecosystem. There were no buildings more than two stories high and indeed no hotels at the beach itself (apart from the aforementioned cluster of eco resorts down by the lagoon). As I understand it that has all changed and whilst the beach front at Tulum is not as developed as the other resorts further up the coast, the town certainly has many more luxury resorts of the sort depicted in the poster.

As I wrote about at the time, that stretch of coastline was already suffering from a climate change induced seaweed invasion, which I thought would be harmful for the tourism industry in that region. Of course I was assuming people wanted to go and swim in the sea, lie on a beach or engage with the scenery in any kind of direct way. What I hadn’t factored in (mainly due to the ignorance of inexperience) was the compound-type resorts of the kind I stayed at in Morocco or saw in the poster. At such a resort the beach and the sea are at best backdrops, something to add character to the infinity pool. From that distance, the seaweed is less noticeable, or even lends a sense of realism to the scene. People who want to see Mayan ruins can be bussed to Chichen Itza and back again without having to engage with the locals. The whole thing can be de-risked as much as possible by hermetically sealing it from the world outside, which is there partly for its scenery, partly for its (tightly curated list of) attractions, partly for its weather and partly for its abundance of cheap labour. Indeed this last is probably the reason why my idea of these resorts opening in Britain will never happen: in order to staff them, we’d have to let immigrants in. I mean we could try and staff them locally, but my country is not renowned for its hospitality industry and I doubt the money saved on airfares would entirely cover the additional labour costs. As an alternative, we could go the Dubai route and allow workers to come here with no rights as citizens, effectively as indentured servants to the resort. Either way such resorts become bastions of global north privilege, keeping the increasingly climate ravaged populations of the global south either securely locked in or securely locked out. It doesn’t matter if their water table is progressively depleted in order to feed the growing number of infinity pools, because they need to work at the holiday compound to be able to afford the bottled water they have to buy as a substitute. Increasingly as the polycrisis accelerates, fortress Europe and fortress America will holiday in literalised simulacra of their states, where the main novelty (apart from the abundance of stolen water) will be direct encounters with the people who make their luxury possible.

I’ve recently encountered a number of reports of the ‘new age of robotics’, where contrary to the bold claims of humanoid robots controlled by AI managing all your domestic chores, most of them are actually remotely operated by teams of operators in countries like the Philippines or India. This is not unique to new robots, there is the common joke amongst some on the Indian subcontinent that ‘AI’ stands for ‘Another Indian’ and ‘GPT’ for ‘Gujarati People Typing’. The parts of the current technological ‘revolution’ that are not actually Mechanical Turks still rely on the abstraction of labour and, in the most part, the abstraction of labour in the global south. A prime example of this is the Kenyan data labellers, who give all the data ingested by LLMs its context. The real intelligence in AI is entirely sourced from the workers of the global south. I’ve spoken before about technology’s ability to abstract labour to hide the true human cost of the end product, but in a fracturing world of privilege and poverty accentuated by the environmental meta-crisis it serves the key purpose of reinforcing borders without diminishing the pool of cheap labour. If you no longer have to have your Filipino maid actually come to your house to clean it, you don’t need to care whether they have enough to keep themselves clean, or fed. Indeed you don’t even need to know they exist at all, you can pretend that your house is cleaned by a smart machine with no input from tele-operators, stolen creative labour or mind numbing data labelling work at all. You can marvel at these ‘autonomous’ machines and simultaneously wonder why those slackers in the global south expect handouts just because they were too stupid not to be born in a climate ravaged country. That is assuming you’re on the right side of the divide.

The divide is key to the future that we are currently being guided towards with a strong understanding that a future extrapolated from current systems and goals cannot be achieved for all. Longtermism acknowledges this explicitly, but it is also implicit in the actions and goals of the Epstein class. Their island bunkers are a worst case option, the last resort if (when) their other versions of techno enclaves don’t work. It must take some high grade self-delusion to build a bunker inside a volcano and not have the billionaire version of that Mitchell and Webb sketch: “Mark, are we Bond villains?” Of course the Bond villains’ motivations were easy to understand, I was more interested in the chumps riding round in golf buggies dressed in a boiler suit and a hard hat, with a machine gun slung over their shoulder. I could never see what their motivation was when outside the bunker was all the glory of the 1960s, but in the bunker of the future the motivation is obvious: outside is nothing but the climate ravaged hordes, desperate to come in and share the bounty of your collective wealth, or at least your cumulative wealth. No one would be so gauche as to collectivise it, you’re all independently wealthy after all, otherwise how could you justify being in the bunker? The other day I heard Wendy Liu talking about tech workers in Silicon Valley wanting to avoid becoming part of “the permanent underclass” as a motivating factor for sleeping in their offices and working seven days a week at wildly overvalued companies that produce nothing of use but consume vast amounts of resources. In such comments, they reveal two things: first that they are happy to don the proverbial boiler suit and helmet and second that they see the bunker (in some form) as inevitable. They have effectively given up on the rest of humanity, having already consigned them to the permanent underclass, doomed to wander the cursed earth outside the bunker, with little hope but to serve the needs of those within for scraps off the table.

Some people may read this and think it is fantastical nonsense but others will say it’s a description of the world we already live in. To some extent it is, but the boundaries of the bunker are often not yet clearly defined, at least not to those of us who live in the global north. We don’t notice the boundaries of the bunker because currently we are inside it. If we only holiday at closed resorts (I include places like Dubai in this description) we never leave the bunker. The bunker is all we know and the divide that separates inside from outside may be so big that we are unaware of It. It may be the border of the EU or the US. It could have until recently been seen as a vast swath of the global north until Trump put paid to that. His disruption of the ‘international rules based order’ has shrunk the bunkers to national (or in the case of the EU a smaller super national) size. For many (neo) liberals, this is a temporary blip in the new world order that can be corrected once the Trump administration has been replaced. The bunker builders see it differently, they’ve done the maths and know that they can’t keep on consuming disproportionate amounts of the world’s resources and keep accumulating wealth without reducing the pool of people who can do so. They understand that with the end of abundant cheap fossil fuel energy and a destabilising climate, they are moving into a zero sum game. Their networked states and planned communities are a logical step in the shrinking of the bunker. Their media conglomerates and AI slop generators are designed to simultaneously create desire to consume more and fear the collapse that consumption hastens. You are supposed to be both paralysed and distracted by this paradoxical consumerism whilst they shift the divide around you, gradually moving you to the outside. Or more likely (initially at least) a lower tier bunker, so there are still ‘others’ outside who you want to keep that way. Such a tiered bunker world - where there are always ‘others’ outside even for those outside- allows the illusion of order, fairness even, to be sustained in the myth of meritocracy.

I was telling my wife that I didn’t think an all inclusive holiday would ever be a satisfactory experience for me as it would never fully cater to my wants. She replied that it absolutely could, the implication being that I just hadn’t spent enough money on one and possibly that I don’t actually have enough money to pay for the kind of all inclusive holiday that would give me everything I wanted. I’m not so sure. I’m sure that if I had enough money, there would be an all inclusive holiday available that would let me swim when I wanted and eat the food that I really wanted whenever I really wanted it, but I suspect I wouldn’t feel comfortable with it. I suspect that the wokey dokey leftie in me would be entirely uncomfortable knowing that the food I wanted that was available when I didn’t want it would largely go to waste, that the energy and resources used simply to make everything available whenever I might want it were several times the energy and resources I’d use up simply providing myself with these things as and when I actually wanted them. The additional bonus of me getting these things myself is that I might encounter the people who produced them (or at least those who sold them) in their own shop, restaurant or cafe. I would encounter them as people whose lives I must interact with, rather than faceless uniformed ‘staff’ there to service my whims, staff who could be replaced by robots, or at least placed at a distance via the medium of a robot.

The bunker world relies on those ‘outside’ being unknown and unknowable, at best unfortunate but more usually undeserving (because… insert justification of privilege here). If the outsiders are seen as people who can be related to as equals, as just other people, the need to stay inside the bunker diminishes. We may even question the need for a bunker at all. We may decide that whilst the world’s abundance may not be what it was, we can look at better ways of distributing what is available amongst all people, rather than hoarding it for those in the bunker. We might begin to believe that a bunker world isn’t inevitable, which is a critical danger to the bunker world itself, as it relies on inevitability to drive the need to be one of the ones on the inside, to avoid being part of the “permanent underclass.” A combination of fear and greed driven by a belief in the inevitability of collapse is the only thing that makes the bunker world possible. As soon as we look outside for a moment and think “why exactly are we doing this?” We will start to question the apparently inevitable and start to think about alternatives that might help us avert catastrophe. We need other perspectives to know what that might look like. A disaster capitalist model is so ingrained in the psyche of the global north, that we have to look elsewhere for definitions of thriving, of success that are not the accumulation of wealth at the expense of the rest of the world. Maybe spending time with the people who live in the places we go on holiday we might find some of these alternative definitions, but only if we step outside the resort and meet our fellow humans where they are.

I’m sure some people will read this and think it doesn’t sound very restful having to engage with other people on holiday. I suspect those people also go to a resort and try to avoid the other holidaymakers there as well (or pretend they’re not there). I’m not suggesting you spend all your time in deep conversation with the locals, but maybe just try to engage with their life a bit. Go to their shops, restaurants and cafes, try their food, get some joy from the company of people who don’t spend all their time desiring more stuff. Or maybe they do, maybe they spend all their time staring at their phones too, maybe that is just another way they’re not so different from you. If the alternative is a holiday where you are increasingly hiding in a form of bunker, increasingly aware that those outside are suffering to sustain your lifestyle, where you are subject to arbitrary rules that only money can buy you out of compliance with, maybe having to learn how to order a beer in the local language isn’t so bad. If the kind of holiday you’ll accept reflects the kind of society you’ll accept, then I know how I want to holiday.

But what of my vision? Which of these futures is it a result of? It could be either. In the bunker future, the resort has been abandoned as Morocco is no longer considered viable as a destination for the bunker societies, whilst a changing climate for has starved the Atlas mountains of snow and rainfall, allowing the desert to reclaim Marrakesh. In an engaged world, maybe the city has been reshaped by the need to adapt to the climatic changes and the resort is deemed unnecessary and allowed to deteriorate as part of a kind of firebreak of buildings that form a buffer against the encroaching desert, allowing the city oasis within to persist. Honestly who knows, it could just be my overactive imagination, but it is a useful vehicle for exploring the the concepts of futures that may be extrapolated from desires of the present. In one, we are just boiler suit minions in the bunker, when we’re not working to get the sun eclipsing satellite launched, we’re so exhausted that we just want to be in a kind of null space, a luxury nowhere, sensorially deprived, switched off. We may as well be the machines that capitalism so desperately wishes we were, because neither at work or play are we actually engaging with life as anything more than a process that allows us to accumulate wealth. We’re just making the numbers up. Literally. In the other we engage with the world and work and play and society and life are messy and difficult and interesting. We get drawn to bunker world by the promise that we might be able to become the Bond villain sitting in the big chair, but for 99.9999575% of us, that is not going to happen. Why sacrifice your whole life for lottery odds?

I’m not saying you should quit the rat race and become a permaculture farmer, but life is about the experiences we have whilst we’re living it, the things we do and share with people who matter to us. If your holiday is your opportunity to live the most of your life to make those memories, why would you want to make it uneventful?

Progression

What does the word ‘progress’ mean to you? What do you think of when you hear that word? Does it conjure up a relentless march of technology, pristine futuristic cities where everything is automated, robots serve your every whim and there is nothing to do but, er, stare at AI generated content on your phone? My problem is that every time I follow that idea to its conclusion I don’t see how it pans out to something I would genuinely like. It’s possibly because the 20th century’s concepts of the future were invented by fascists. Streamlined vehicles, polished skyscrapers, automated machinery and, possibly most importantly, neatly ordered societies.

As I was passing by yet another jury-rigged extension cable the other day - from a flat via a bus stop to an EV - I realised why the fossil fuel industry hates EVs so much and spread so much disinformation about them. It’s not just that they don’t use petrol, as the energy companies (as they rebranded themselves when they thought they needed people to think they weren’t just fossil fuel companies) could just as easily pivot to providing other forms of energy (as their rebrand suggested), it’s the fact that those companies can’t control the delivery of that energy. If you own a petrol or diesel powered car you can’t refine your own fuel, you have to go to a petrol station to get it. If you own an EV, there is nothing to stop you cutting the energy companies out of the loop entirely. Stick a bunch of solar panels on your roof, plug in your car and boom, nature refuelled your car for you. You don’t ever need to go to a petrol station again. I mean if you’re on a long journey you might want to charge at a motorway service station, but by and large you can cut big energy out of the equation entirely. Dwelling on this, I could easily envisage a future London that doesn’t look too dissimilar to the one we have now, except with more solar panels and more cables running from upstairs windows and snaking down lamp posts. Where the reduction in grime does not come from removing all evidence of humanity but from removing the consequences of extractive capital.

As a concept of the future I believe this is the sort of thing that falls under the umbrella of solarpunk, but I would be wary of giving it any science fiction label, partly for fear giving it the sheen of unrealism attributed to fiction, but also to avoid the risk of making it niche. The technology led progress of classical science fiction is solid branding for hard capital. In the current moment this is everywhere in the ever receding horizons of self driving cars, autonomous robots, Martian colonies and computer superintelligence. Instead of selling their products as a pathway to an indistinct utopian future (à la Futurama at the World’s Fair) the top level shills of the 21st century have just decided to take their favourite science fiction tropes and declare them imminent. Like cult leaders unfazed by the non-arrival of their predicted rapture, the tech elite blatantly ignore any number of their self-declared deadlines by simply insisting a new one is imminent. The totality of impact of these apparent technological advances has increased as well. The impending changes are no longer going to just improve aspects of our lives, but solve all our supposed problems, seemingly instantly and in totality. The obvious technology in this regard is of course AI or AGI, which is going to usher in an age of abundance, solve the climate crisis and cure cancer pretty much before anyone has even turned it on. Of course what this actually shows is how far away we are from any of this technology doing anything of the sort. The astonishing lack of understanding of the complexity of the problems they think their technology will solve underlines just how far they are from realistically solving them. As I have said before, many of the things they have managed to do - build rockets, miniaturise computers, make machines that can bullshit convincingly - are very clever things and are notable technical achievements, but they do not in of and as of themselves progress our society in any meaningful sense. We should be very wary of anyone who believes they have a complete answer to humanity’s problems or even a full understanding of them. We live in a very complex world, but we need to be aware that an ability to create complex systems does not equate to an ability to understand them and therefore to an ability to control them. The greatest complexity lies in human society and the fact that every person in that society may have a different idea about what it is for and how it should work. Techno utopians (what Meredith Broussard calls techno chauvinists) have a fundamental issue with that complexity, they see it as messy, requiring standardisation.

I’ve been driving up north a bit recently to help my parents out and I passed through the Tyne tunnel for the first time in many years. Surprisingly it has changed a lot. Firstly it’s now actually two tunnels, so traffic flows nice and quickly, but also the fact that there are no longer toll gates means you barely notice it as a discrete piece of infrastructure that requires a toll to be paid for its use. There are of course large signs at either end of the tunnel reminding you to pay by midnight the following night to avoid being fined. First time I passed through I thought “oh that’s convenient” and promptly forgot about it until a letter arrived on my doorstep a week later with a photo of my car number plate and a £60 fine. This struck me as indicative of so much of how ‘progress’ is defined and measured these days. Anyone involved in the management or administration of the tunnel would see its latest incarnation as a great success and they would have the metrics to prove it too: traffic flow through the tunnel increased, mean time to travel from one side of the Tyne to the other reduced: revenues increased, etc. job done, problem solved. The fact that this method of collection also introduces the chance of nonpayment, especially for casual users like me will also be seen as a benefit as it massively increases revenue for almost no extra cost (or almost certainly a reduced cost compared to staffing tollbooths). However, from a user perspective it is a trade off between spending a few minutes waiting at a tool booth to toss some coins in a hopper or tap your card on a reader and spending several minutes on a website creating an account/resetting your password, setting up a payment method, validating your payment card, etc. or forgetting to do all this and getting fined. The benefits are clearly very much in the favour of the provider rather than the consumer, yet it will be presented as a convenience to the consumer as well because they don’t have to stop pay for the tunnel at the point they use it.

This is very much the standard for models of so called technological progress: visible friction is removed at the point of transaction usually at the expense of additional effort further down the ‘stack’. The intended solution for this delegated friction is that you become part of an ecosystem that will manage all your payments and subscriptions for you. This is the idea behind the Apple ecosystem and similarly the Google/Android one, and both of these work to a certain extent, you can log into websites of apps using things like keychain that mean you don’t need to remember passwords, you can use their payment systems for both subscriptions and one off payments. All of these things make navigating the modern internet much easier but they require you to be locked in to that ecosystem, to share all of your personal data and online activity with a single provider who gets to choose what you can and can’t interact with. If you’re an Apple customer and Apple ban your favourite app from the AppStore, then you can’t use it. You might think “that doesn’t matter because Apple will only ban things that are not suitable for the general public.” You might assume some form of code of decency or something governing what gets on the AppStore, but the only real criterion is whether it makes money for the right people. Consider what happened to the OG App, an app that was designed to take your Instagram feed and show it to you in the manner that Instagram used to work: your contacts’ posts listed in reverse chronological order. It was wildly popular in the few weeks it existed before Meta asked Apple to take it off the AppStore. It was killed because it got in the way of Meta filling up their users’ feed with adverts and sponsored slop. Conversely X (the app formerly known as twitter) has been allowing its users to generate non-consensual pornography and CSAM via its GrokAI and whilst that is a clear violation of Apple’s terms of service, X is still very much available in the AppStore. These two examples clearly demonstrate that your interests are not being served by the companies that own these ecosystems, you are there only because you have agreed to follow their rules and be bound by their decisions about what is acceptable and what is not. Just as the energy companies want you to continue buying petrol so they can tie you into their ecosystem of petrol stations, the tech giants want to tie you into their apps and payment ecosystems so you have to keep paying them for everything (literally everything in Apple’s case - they take 30% of every single transaction).

The fact is that any fully integrated digital future requires you to conform to the sets of rules dictated to you. Look at the tens of pages of legal agreements you blithely sign up to every time there is an update to a service you use. When you think about it there could be quite a high price for the perception of convenience, but you wouldn’t necessarily know about it until you found yourself on the wrong side of a user license agreement that you signed without reading. These agreements aren’t sets of rules for you to follow as much as broad definitions of the ways in which technology companies may exercise their power over you. The agreements are designed such that the rules may change at any time, but the companies still have a right to bind you to them. This commercial and legal consolidation of Wilhoit’s Law proves as much as anything else the inherent conservatism of big tech in that it creates a legal framework in which one party is almost entirely bound and the other almost entirely protected. Technology companies and their leaders clearly see this as a form of natural order rather than a byproduct of corporate risk management and this is now displayed in their complicity in the various forms of authoritarianism we see blossoming the world over. To authoritarians the relationship of the people to the state is effectively a user license agreement, by living in a country, you no longer agree to abide by its laws, but to be bound by any terms the state chooses to impose on you by any means. This is clearly evident in the USA where the regime’s assumption is that by living in the country, its population have agreed to be subject to the violent whims of its paramilitary forces, but as usual the UK is playing catch up. The effective criminalisation of protests against government foreign policy means that UK citizens are expected to accept government policy without any form of recourse but the ballot box. Of course some people would argue that that is the way ‘civilised’ democracy should work. I used to say that if you don’t vote you can’t complain and I still believe that, but that doesn’t mean that if you do vote you don’t need to complain. Despite what many people seem to think, representative democracy is not the process of you absenting any responsibility for your place in society by putting an x in a box every couple of years. One of the complaints of people who choose not to vote is that none of the candidates fully represent their views, which misses the point of representative democracy. An MP is not a service you buy to take care of politics for you, they are a portal through which you express your political will. Like any portal, they have a number of ‘features’ which will be discontinued if they are not used enough. Individual MPs have surgeries, email inboxes (both parliamentary and constituency) and endless social media accounts through which you can tell them what you want. Broader interactions with the government can be achieved through petitions, email campaigns and protest. Just because the government has all but banned protest doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t be forced to respond if millions of people took to the streets to protest a single issue.

Like platform owners, governments want to phase out the ‘features’ that don’t give them the outcomes they want. They see their purpose as nothing to do with delivering good experiences or services, as both government and corporations serve the same goal: growth. This means that users/citizens are always secondary to that goal and is the reason why enshittification is central to both. Authoritarianism is simply the enshittification of politics, where we are convinced that eroding our rights and freedoms in the name of ‘safety’ and ‘progress’ is core to the process of optimising the population for growth. Just as a platform will tell you that spamming you with endless adverts is good for user experience, so a government will tell you that locking you up for protesting against being polluted to death is essential for delivering you a functioning society. In both cases, what is deemed ‘good’ and ‘functional’ has nothing to do with addressing the needs of the user/citizen and so nothing to do with democracy.

Democracy is a system whereby groups of people work out what they want for themselves and their society. It is not a fixed process, but a process of change, a negotiation where the priorities will constantly shift. Certainly for the whole of my lifetime I have been sold the concept of democracy as a fixed function, something that will work best if I simply allow it to run its processes and then make my (limited) choice when prompted by the system. Interference at any other point is to be discouraged and ideally banned altogether. The idea ultimately is that the state should be able to get its citizens to fit into neat categories that can be called upon to act on the state in only the ways the state wants them to act. The neoliberal technocrats of all stripes that run these systems are keen to come up with distinct categories of people who will help them achieve their ends (such as the legendary Mondeo Man) and those of us who fall outside of those categories* may be ignored. Much like the users who fall outside easily monetisable categories, citizens who fall outside electorally significant groups can be ignored, bound to terms of service for a service that doesn’t reflect their needs.

In both cases the response is not to vote with your feet/wallet and disengage, as this has no effect. How can you snub someone who was ignoring you anyway? The only effective action is to reframe the terms of service, engage in ways that work for you. The revival of interest in Luddism has brought about the understanding that it is not an anti technology movement, but about removing the ability of those in power to use technology as a way to control and exploit us. As was so evident in the suppression of the original luddites, the state and capital have always been comfortable in colluding to exert control, and the depth of commercial infiltration of our modern state embeds that collusion at a level almost of instinct. As outsourcing has gutted the knowledge embedded in public services, commercial priorities have encroached ever further into the philosophy of government. The language of public service has changed from serving citizens to delivering service to customers, with almost everything being commodified, pushing the idea that your taxes should be a quid pro quo charge for each service. There are some companies involved in public sector contracts whose founders have expressed the opinion that public services shouldn’t exist. For them the idea of a direct correlation between a discrete service and the tax you are levied for it is ideal, as this would open all services up to competition regulation, privatising them by default. We cannot therefore engage with the public sector in a way that reinforces those concepts. If I am pissed off about Thames water increasing my bills by 40% to service the obscene debts they accrued paying their shareholders dividends, I can hardly vote with my wallet. There is no water supply market, I can’t go to a better supplier. I need to pester the politicians who allow this extortion to continue. I write to them, I petition them, I threaten not to vote for them (regardless of whether I ever have) and of course I vote for someone else.

It should only be marginally different for technology, you cannot (yet) functionally walk away from all ‘big tech’ completely, but you can redifine your relationship to it. This requires more engagement than just signing up, agreeing to the terms of service and then hitting ‘yes’ in response to every pop up. It requires you to think a bit about how you engage, what you’re willing to exchange and what you get in return. I’ve long considered much of my data to be a high price to pay for the convenience of being able to stay in touch with my friends without having to make an effort to actually speak to them. Quitting some social media platforms is potentially a big sacrifice for some people, so maybe start with a bit of fragmentation, make sure your email provider is not the same as your payment provider, don’t use your social media account as your passkey for all other websites and definitely don’t allow any app to track your activity across other apps. This will mean you have to get used to a few different services, you can still use a keychain type service, just not the one your social media provider offers you. This will be marginally more effort, but the main difference you’ll notice is that the ad targeting will be a bit less accurate. Beyond that we have to be more proactive in our interactions with technology and its providers. Being passive consumers has led us to a situation where technology companies have wasted billions on technologies that no one actually wants or needs (crypto, NFTs, the metaverse, generative AI). Of course giving feedback to technology companies requires us to know what we want from our technology. That requires us to break away from the narratives of progress that revolve around efficiency, productivity, more technology being better technology, etc. There won’t necessarily be easy answers that aren’t spoon fed to us by organisations looking to profit from us, looking to co-opt superficially utopian visions of the future to present an inevitability to us. Defining an alternative will be a challenge, but we can always come back to the question “what does the word ‘progress’ mean to you?”

*the point where these categorisations cross is the tech world’s obsession with various ways of quantifying intelligence, which is deeply embedded in eugenics and racism.