What technology takes from us ⊗ Private sufficiency, public abundance

What technology takes from us—and how to take it back

Rebecca Solnit argues that technology, driven by capitalist and Silicon Valley ideologies, encourages us to prioritise having over doing, which undermines our relationships, our aptitude for solitude, and our sense of self. This relentless focus on efficiency and quantification devalues the rich, difficult experiences that build resilience, connection, and meaning in life. She warns that machines demand we become more like them—reducing human interaction to frictionless exchanges—while pushing digital substitutes for genuine social contact. To resist this dehumanisation, we must cherish the embodied, imperfect realities of being with others and rebuild spaces where democracy, trust, and joy can flourish.

It’s not lost on me that, as much as I completely agree with Solnit, it’s also a contrast to my great interest in technology. But it also makes sense, you have to be completely entranced with Silicon Valley tech to not realise that we have strayed for away from any kind of reasonable balance. Like many things, it’s not a binary but a spectrum.

Here’s a quote by Edward O. Wilson, which you might have read almost as often as Gibson’s unevenly distributed futures.

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”

This discrepancy is often presented as a problem, that we are not “up to date,” enough to keep up with our own technology. But, and Solnit explains it well, our bodies are built for certain ways of doing things, of living, of interacting. We should focus on aligning with that, not on catching up to whatever tech bros have most recently thought up and thrown at us to make a buck (well, billions of bucks).

One last thing. For a little while it was common to say that, against all odds, “the geeks/nerds had ‘won.’” Self-identifying as a geek, I felt that for a while, but we now have to realise that the geeks were (are) broken, why are we falling for their “solutions”? They/we should take time to mend ourselves and meet each other again, not try to “patch” our difficulties with tech.

We are told that machines will become like us, but in many ways they demand we become more like them. To let that happen is to lose something immeasurably valuable. That immeasurability is what makes this struggle difficult, but what cannot be measured can be described or at least evoked and valued. It cannot be boiled down to simple metrics such as efficiency and profitability. […]

I want to praise difficulty, not for its own sake, but because so much of what we want, we get through endeavours that are difficult. The difficulty is why doing something is rewarding; you have accomplished something, exerted effort and skill, stayed with the trouble, tested your limits, realised your intentions – or sometimes failed at all these things, and that too can be important, as can learning to survive failure. […]

There is a sense of belonging that goes deeper than words when we are with people who care about us, and even more so when we are in alignment, whether it’s two people falling into step on a walk or a dozen dancing together or a congregation praying or 10,000 marching together. […]

Coan noted in a recent interview that the normal approach to studying the brain and the mind is to isolate a person. But, as he pointed out, the normal state of being human over the aeons is not isolation; it’s being with others. […]

We need to rebuild or reinvent the ways and places in which we meet; we need to recognise them as the space of democracy, of joy, of connection, of love, of trust.

Private sufficiency, public abundance

“The story of economics has been the story of scarcity, but what would it take to change the narrative?” The Future Observatory Journal “explored that question through a roundtable discussion,” the article is a recap of those exchanges.

The author explores how shifting from a narrative of scarcity to one of abundance—social, material, and natural—can inspire more optimistic and sustainable ways of living. The piece highlights the importance of creating spaces for conversations that challenge dominant economic and social stories, fostering a metamodern worldview focused on conscious evolution. Drawing on examples like Indigenous wisdom and E. O. Wilson’s (yes, him again) biophilia hypothesis, the discussion emphasised our innate connection to nature and the potential for innovation within planetary limits. The idea of private sufficiency combined with public abundance encourages rethinking consumption and resources, suggesting that what humanity has produced can be enough if reused continuously and shared equitably.

Consumerism, capitalism, individualism. I’m starting to realise that dogmatic classical economists are as harmful to society as maximalist techies. If we rediscover what Solnit is highlighting above, then we can re-appreciate living together, in abundance, instead of trying to buy individual abundance in a world of scarcity.

The American Economic Association defines economics as ‘the study of scarcity, the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives’. A common criticism of neoliberal economics is that it creates artificial scarcity by taking goods that were common and commoditising them, which, in turn, leads to hoarding, exploitation and hierarchical social structures. […]

She asserts that they follow a principle of ‘least resistance’, which is that they pursue their existence in ways that use minimum energy and create minimum resistance. In ecosystems, excess consumption has been ‘evolved out’ – in other words, species or ecosystems that thrived while using other resources or less energy would have out-competed those that consumed more. […]

She described how scarcity often underlies much thinking about healthcare – the view being that there are millions of patients requiring treatment, limited resources, and this will only get more difficult in an ageing society. This is effectively a sickness service rather than one that truly embodies health and care. […]

This perhaps provides evidence for an emerging metamodern worldview that is more determined to move on from the antagonising polarities of modernity and postmodernity, towards more unifying narratives that engage with what some refer to as ‘conscious evolution’. Just as biological evolution developed through variation and selection of genes, it is postulated that human consciousness is evolving through variation and selection of memes.

§ With Ring, American consumers built a surveillance dragnet. “It does not take an imagination of any sort to envision this being tweaked to work against suspected criminals, undocumented immigrants, or others deemed ‘suspicious’ by people in the neighborhood. Many of these use cases are how Ring has been used by people on its dystopian ‘Neighbors’ app for years.”

Later in the week, Ring cancelled its partnership with Flock Safety after a surveillance backlash. This is likely not the last time they try something like this, so I’m sharing both.

§ The kingdom of misfits, on slime molds in Prospect Park Ravine, Brooklyn’s last remaining forest (and more generally). ◼ Will fungi thwart the destructive rise of the anthropocene? “The earth’s ecosystem relies on interdependency, as the curators of Fungi: Anarchist Designers reflect in an interdisciplinary show that fuses research and art to centre mushrooms in our daily lives.”

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• 10F Consortium, open-source foresight on global transformation. “The 10F Consortium is a collaborative public service foresight project that brings together 20+ experienced practitioners to map critical global shifts over the next decade. Unlike proprietary consulting reports or institutional forecasts, 10F Consortium operates as an independent network providing open-source analysis of systemic changes reshaping our world. The project produces 10 critical forecasts covering domains from global trade systems to technology governance, climate adaptation to migration patterns.”
• Living in a culture of futurelessness. “Young people are feeling the effects of a collective backwards cultural gaze, research from Starling and Tapestry has found. Annie Auerbach and Adam Chmielowski explore this ‘culture of futurelessness’ and call on brands and insight leaders to step up.”
• What companies that excel at strategic foresight do differently. “[They] are able to systematically track both predictable future events and true unknowns across short- and long-term horizons. Based on a survey of 500 organizations, firms with more advanced foresight capabilities report a meaningful performance edge, driven by data-forward methods, continuous signal detection, and an explicit focus on potential upsides to risks—not just downsides.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• The Thinking Game. (YouTube link, free to view.) “Filmed over five years by the award winning team behind AlphaGo, the documentary examines how DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis’s extraordinary beginnings shaped his lifelong pursuit of artificial general intelligence. It chronicles the rigorous process of scientific discovery, documenting how the team moved from mastering complex strategy games to solving the 50-year-old "protein folding problem" with AlphaFold - a breakthrough that would win a Nobel Prize.”
• Where is AI taking us? Eight leading thinkers share their visions. Includes Melanie Mitchell, Gary Marcus, and Helen Toner. “As society wrestles with whether A.I. will lead us into a better future or catastrophic one, Times Opinion turned to eight experts for their predictions on where A.I. may go in the next five years. Listening to them may help us bring out the best and mitigate the worst out of this new technology.”
• The new Fabio is Claude. Bleh. “The romance industry, always at the vanguard of technological change, is rapidly adapting to A.I. Not everyone is on board.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Analysis: China’s CO2 emissions have now been “flat or falling” for 21 months. “Solar power output increased by 43% year-on-year, wind by 14% and nuclear 8%, helping push down coal generation by 1.9%. Energy storage capacity grew by a record 75 gigawatts (GW), well ahead of the rise in peak demand of 55GW.”
• CO2 turned into starch: China’s new method boosts productivity by 10x. “Researchers at the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology have reportedly found a way to synthesize starch directly from carbon dioxide. Achieved using only enzymes and raw materials, this new process, they report, is 10 times more productive than previous attempts. What’s more, the process doesn’t rely on plants or photosynthesis, and could help make industrial-scale manmade starch production commercially viable.”
• What a successful rainforest recovery program sounds like. “The results revealed that the din of life in forests regrowing under a program that paid landowners to leave pastureland untouched had a lot in common with intact forests in the area, Delgado and colleagues reported recently in Global Change Biology.”

Asides

• Inside Japan’s most influential architect’s working studio (Tadao Ando). The space! The shelves! The books! The desk! “Documents the daily rhythms of work and the careful, repetitive making of architectural scale models that sit at the center of his practice. The focus is not on finished buildings, but on process. Time spent refining ideas. Returning to the same forms again and again. Letting work unfold slowly.”
• The Case of the Green Covers “is a risograph-printed zine that documents the history of the ‘Green Penguins,’ ‘a series of hundreds of crime novels published with green covers by the UK publisher Penguin in the 1960s’.” You had me at Penguin covers. Ok, also at risograph. Ok, also at zine.
• Ambient Videos. Made by Noah Kalina, so everything’s gorgeous. “I started a YouTube channel, where I make ambient videos that are sometimes as long as two hours. They’re meant to be put on your TV and left there. Background. Ambiance. Something quiet in a room while you do something else, or nothing at all. In a way they are just screensavers, but every now and then something unexpected might happen.”
• Why this tiny robot is a breakthrough for flight. “It is a flying robot no bigger than a paperclip, with wings that flap instead of spin. And it does not drift or wobble like most tiny drones. It darts, flips, and accelerates through the air with the speed and control of a real bumblebee.”
• Serendipity - Etymology, origin & meaning. Wait, what? “Serendip (also Serendib), attested by 1708 in English, is an old name for Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka), from Arabic Sarandib, from Sanskrit Simhaladvipa ‘Dwelling-Place-of-Lions Island’.” (Via Scope of Work.)