Zombie Technology

1.
There are so many types of zombies that it’s hard to pick a favourite. Zombiepedia lists runners, crawlers, stalkers, screamers, pukers and exploders, to name just a few. I find myself captivated by the zombies in 28 Days Later. Entertained by the zombies in World War Z. And surprisingly amused by the zombies in three or four of the best Resident Evil movies.

Whatever version of zombiedom we’re talking about, all zombies share common features. They are undead. Which is to say, they move and act, but in a soulless way that lacks the defining features of human existence. Zombies are humans stripped of humanity.

Today’s technology, including vast swathes of the internet, feels zombified. It’s not dead. But it’s not really alive either. It just continues to exist. Stalking us. Tempting us to take unhealthy risks. Ready to pounce on our weaknesses and exploit them. Making us go through life on the defensive. Always apprehensive. Trying to protect ourselves and our loved ones.

2.
We all have that precious list of books that “really made a difference”. One of those for me is Liquid Modernity, by Zygmunt Bauman, which came out in 2000, amid the flurry of books about post-modernity. It was a book I read and reread during the zenith of my academic years.

One idea that particularly stood out was the concept of zombie words. Bauman suggested that many of the words we use in every day discourse feel like they mean something. But they are actually empty. Their meaning has evaporated. They refer to cultural concepts that are no longer alive. Yet we continue to use the words.

We use them just because we use them.

For Bauman, “community” is one example of a zombie word. We hear all sorts of things – schools, churches, even online spaces – described as communities. But social life is becoming ever more fragmented and individualised. We are increasingly lonely. We struggle to find a sense of belonging, shared purpose, or mutual accountability.

We say community when, really, we mean something more like people who are lumped together in a common category.

Technology has started to feel like a zombie word. It used it to describe the vanguard of innovation. Solutions for better living. Progress towards human freedom. Now it’s more like something that traps us.

3.
The early internet felt vibrant because the barriers to entry were low. People couldn’t start newspapers. Buying and running a printing press at scale was expensive. The costs rose for radio and again for TV. Both came with increasing amounts of regulation as well. But starting a website cost nothing. And there were no rules you needed to comply with.

Websites are now governed by opaque and mysterious rules that decide whether people can find a page via a search engine. Try to share a link on a social media platform and there’s a good chance your followers won’t see it. Your account might even get punished for trying. No wonder most websites look the same and people who have created stuff have to play weird games to get people to notice their work.

None of this is likely to change in the short term. The motivations of those who own the internet experience – the people behind Google, Meta, X, SubStack, YouTube, TikTok, and the rest – are so massively misaligned with the interests of people who create the stuff that it makes the internet interesting.

4.
Tech came for music first. But no one really cared because they loved filling their hard drives with free music. Tech came for designers as well. But free fonts were fun. Photographs and artwork were used all over the internet without attribution or licensing. Finally AI came for everyone who had ever published anything anywhere.

But by then the apologists for the elision, of artist’s rights had done their work. We were told “great artists steal” and “everything is a remix”, which laid the groundwork for the notion that anyone could be an artist if they just asked AI the right questions. By then, the makers of these tools weren’t even apologising. They admitted their business model couldn’t work if we protected copyright, and they spoke of artists in air quotes.

5.
The infrastructure of technology belongs to billionaires. But it wasn’t always like that. The first internet service provider I signed up with was a side project run by a friend of a friend. Hosting for a few web pages came free. There was no social media. There were barely even search engines. Mostly, you followed links from one site to another. Surfing the web was what we called it. Discovering interesting pages was a combination of luck and skill. Mostly luck. Some people connected their life online with their professional existence. Academics, in particular, were doing this from very early on. But no one was making money from the internet. Having a presence on the web was a kind of hobby. A way to learn. Or just something fun to mess around with.

Now we are just data points in a vast money-making machine. The experiences we have with technology might not be pleasant or even all that useful to us. They are shaped to serve the needs of those who own the online tools we use. Increasingly, those needs extend beyond just making more money and include the dissemination of misinformation and the acquisition of political power. We are pawns in the games oligarchs play.

6.
2013–2023 was the decade of technological zombification. Platforms became increasingly hostile towards their users. There were precious few innovations. The ones pitched to us – crypto, NFTs, Web3, AI – promise abstract and unrealised benefits, demand a cult-like belief in eschatological salvation, or are simply tools for grifting and corruption.

Gamergate was a small controversy in the greater scheme of things. But it broke the internet. Gamergate mainstreamed online harassment and trolling, including the strategy of undermining civil discourse online. The assault on DEI, so-called “wokeness”, and even democracy itself has roots in Gamergate.

After Gamergate, the internet became harsher and more misanthropic. But the tech world in general became more cynical and unable to brook criticism.

Nothing feels more cynical than the claims that we are on the verge of Artificial General Intelligence. It takes a monstrously low estimation of what it means to be human to claim the current crop of faltering, large-language models are in any way close to replicating human intelligence. And yet here we are.

7.
And this is really the crux. The internet doesn’t exist because someone decided to build a social media platform or a search engine. It exists because people decided to share their lives online. Post their photos. Convey their knowledge. And seek out human connection.

The web emerged from millions of small experiments in personal expression. Harvesting all that creativity for the enrichment of a few is one of the greatest economic injustices in human history.

If we want an alternative, an internet for the rest of us, then it has to start here, with our need for human connection and with addressing the moral injustice at the heart of technology’s zombification.

Maybe I am excessively prone to optimism, but I believe there are still a few ways we can carve out spaces to use technology for human liberation.

8.
Harnessing technology feels like a lifeless chore when our efforts are disconnected from the joy of relating to other humans. Working to build human happiness yields joy. Working to appease an algorithm never does. Software updates that only take care of the device seldom yield joy. Tweaking a sentence so it lands better with a reader feels rewarding. Adjusting your words to appease a search engine leaves you feeling devalued.

Technology makes sense in so far as it fosters and supports human connection. We don’t need a forum of rage lined with advertisements. We need a digital representation of properly functioning society. We need tools that help us build that society. And we need them priced equitably and made accessible to all.

9.
Imagine if your diet consisted of eating only what was on sale at your nearest shopping mall food court. It’s hardly a prescription for a healthy body. But that’s the equivalent to outsourcing your information diet to social media algorithms and trending topics. Like the food we eat, the information we consume needs to be nutritious. Fast food and sugary drinks might be okay now and then, but we can’t thrive on that stuff.

One of the things tech’s era of zombification ate was expertise. Far from being authoritative articulators of evidence-based knowledge, experts are now just one voice in the noisy post-truth public discourse. It’s tempting to imagine expertise doesn’t matter anymore when Wikipedia makes everyone feel like all the world’s knowledge is at their fingertips. At least until we have to solve really complex, real-world problems – like how to face a pandemic, respond to climate change, or reconfigure the world economy when a large country goes rogue.

We need to calibrate our information diet as carefully as we control our nutritional diet. Both require informed choice oriented towards healthy living and human flourishing. Read like you eat. Like your life and longevity depend on it.

10.
There is only one alternative to tech eating art. We have to pay. We have to pay for music, films, creative writing, design, art, photography. We also need to support the institutions that provide the teaching and research that make these kinds of activities possible.

And those of us who make things also have to find ways for people to pay us.

Perhaps the greatest lie on the internet is that there is non-commercial space. Anything you post online is making someone money. Every tech company makes money from what you share online, whether you notice or not.

We need to stop shaming people who want to be paid for their labour.

11.
Technology is a tool to enhance real-world experiences and not an end in itself. But technological zombification asks us to be subhuman.

Facebook’s Meta project was perhaps the most dystopian example of this trend. Virtual reality as a way to make digital gaming more immersive, or perhaps to make online meetings more interesting, is a worthwhile idea. But Facebook wanted more. If all the money in the world isn’t enough, then why not push everyone into a virtual world where wealth and power are not constrained by real-world limitations like how much water our planet has?

From seasteading and crypto-based smart cities to virtual reality, colonising Mars or replacing every human worker with an AI, the tech fantasy involves restarting civilisation in the absence of everything that civilised us – rules and culture and religion and some sort of relationship to the natural order.

I’m not going to Mars. My guess is you aren’t either. This earth is it for us. Let’s put it first and live a big and wonderful life enjoying what it has to offer us.