Have We Lost The Plot?

“Our lives have become dematerialized.”

That phrase – from author Ian Bogost in a short piece in Wired – struck at the center of something I’ve been trying to verbalize for years. Bogost argues that technologies of convenience and efficiency have destroyed our connection to the physical world. His primary example is the automobile – first the automatic transmission replaced our physical connection to the road, then the EV made gears obsolete. Now driving itself is retreating into a digital interface – Waymo, Uber, and Tesla are seeing to that.

I’ve long argued that whatever can be digitized, will be digitized. In early eras of the digital revolution, that meant office work – typewriters, calendars, and rolodexes tossed into the digital wood-chipper and smoothed into “software” painted across glimmering green cathode ray tubes. Later, the rise of search and the web augured the end of materially bound information – vinyl albums, bulky yellow pages, printed magazines, books and newspapers. Then apps swallowed the rest of our interactions with the world – from dating to banking to meetings and getting a reservation at a restaurant.

I was an early and avid enthusiast of this shift – I imagined a more perfect world of knowledge and experience, freed of the constraints of the physical world. But lately I’ve begun to question this philosophy.

Software has indeed eaten the world, but I believe we’ve not entirely considered the consequences of the meal. The loss of direct interactions with other human beings is certainly the most obvious downside. What happens to us when physicality becomes optional, and we can engage with others through the mediating glow of smoothed glass and pixels? We’ve two decades of data on that question already, and if you think it points only to progress, well, I respectfully disagree.

For some, this transition is not only positive, it’s an inevitable step toward humanity’s destiny as an immaterial species. And what’s more incorporeal than God? “Silicon Valley has a God complex,” writes Reid Hoffman, one of tech’s more thoughtful observers. He describes the Valley religion as containing many “denominations,” including Humanists and Missionaries, who I’d argue are wary of dematerialism, and Narcissists and Accelerationists, who I’d argue are most certainly not. If technology is a lever, Hoffman writes, “The Narcissists believe the lever exists to elongate their own shadow. The Accelerationists believe the lever must be pulled without hesitation or respite.”

“No other animal has rewritten its own cognitive architecture through what it builds,” Hoffman continues before concluding that we should not fear technology’s progress, but rather embrace a Humanist approach to its integration in society. I agree with him, but I’m increasingly convinced the Humanists are losing the argument.

There’s always been a particularly virulent strain of “narcissistic accelerationism” in tech, but for most of the past 40 years, it’s been muted. With the rise of AI, the political philosophy of tech has shifted toward raw power and unobstructed capitalism. And it’s that combination – the power of actors like Musk, Karp, Theil, Andreessen, and Trump fused with the seductive whisper of a God-like artificial intelligence – that has been worried we’ve lost the plot. If we’re on an inevitable journey toward immortality, if we are destined to be freed of this mortal coil, well, what’s the point of caring about the problems of mere mortals suffering in the physical world? It’s unfortunate, of course, that so many must suffer now, but in a generation or two, nirvana awaits.

Right?!

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