On Hope
We all dream of a day where we truly enjoy the sun. I am talking about a day where we do not have notifications in the back of our heads. I am talking about the day where we can enjoy time spent with friends without a device mining our attention. I dream of a day where we can be free from the grips of the Virtual City.
When I advocate for regulating the internet, people usually respond, “Yes the internet is has some flaws, but it helps people make a living.” Or the famous, “Yeah, but it is what it is. What is it now you’ll fight against airplanes?” The issue with these statements is that no one said anything about preventing progress or people from making a living. We are in this pickle because we were sold a false choice. Regulating the internet was tantamount to being against innovation. If anyone had any doubts about YouTube or Spotify, some people would reflexively say, “Artists need a platform to become famous.” In software engineering, avoiding the use of AI coding tools means you are not keeping up with the times. In essence, companies tell us: “Choose this, or choose inferiority.”
What we really should ask ourselves is, “Should we choose this?” Here is a statement free of judgement and allows us to think critically about our choice. What we have in front of us is a product trying to replace a previous practice or technology. To characterize the previous way of doing something as “inferior” without any context unfairly judges the previous practice. Perhaps there is wisdom in how things are done and maybe improving it does not necessitate letting another company replace the practice.
Instead of building a skyscraper to shield your face from the sun, just get a hat. Companies are not always the answer to issues. People always recoil at the idea of an over-zealous car salesman. We must treat tech companies in the same vein no matter how attractive the user interface is.
The choices those platforms provide move us towards a sale. With haste, we risk delegating our agency and money to a company. We should slow down and think for a moment.
To come up with the ultimate startup idea, we hear about thinking outside of the box, coming up with the billion dollar idea, and disrupting the market. We should have the same approach when choosing any product. Is this technology worth it? Does it actually solve an existing problem or merely repackages the same issue? Does it disrupt a systemic inefficiency? Does it centralize market power? Should we not invest in resources to develop the same product on our terms instead?
I hear of quants looking for the most ridiculous signals to feed into their models to achieve the highest trading returns. These people clutch at every single bit of cloudy thought to make the most money.
But if someone puts a sliver of doubt into the technology that rules over us to have the highest returns for society, that person is against the spirit of humanity itself.
How cynical we have become! We do not have to choose between progress or critique. We do not have to choose between prosperity or lethargy. Let us dream of better possibilities, of different perspectives.
I think of Ernst Bloch’s introduction in The Principle of Hope:
“How richly people have always dreamed of this, dreamed of the better life that might be possible.”
The choices we have are innumerable, tried time and again in the past and yet to be tried in future generations. Some are successful and others not so much. How richly people have dreamed, and how richly will they continue to dream. Let us try something untried.
There is a world where we have an internet that shares a limited amount of data. There is a world where social media applications work for communities instead of a company. There is a world with a web browser that is not controlled by a single company. Some readers will know that there exist concrete solutions to every hypothetical I posed, from EU privacy legislative efforts, to Mastodon, and the Ladybird browser. The daydreams of humanity are not so abstract in the end: They are there for anyone who dares to look beyond.
To those who say that it is hopeless to fight against big companies due to the realities that put them in power, I reply with another passage from Bloch’s book:
“Hopelessness is itself, in a temporal and factual sense, the most insupportable thing, downright intolerable to human needs.”
To dream for a better future is to hope. What better world to live in than the one illuminated by hope. In the end, when a candle runs out we turn on a new one, marking a new beginning.
