What is tech doing?

So it turns out I'm pretty angry these days. Which is weird for me. Really, really weird. I've always been oddly prideful about the kind of forced optimism and good-faith I try to face toward the world around me. It's served me well in the past, to many extents, and with a healthy dose of extremely good fortune in a burning world, I've been afforded the opportunity to keep trying it. Meaning, I am not unaware of how my entire sung tune would have been different if I had had one or more real, honest hiccups in life. Prolongued unemployment, less human friendship, different brainial genetics, whathaveyou.

I say all this this way because I'd like you, dear reader, to understand that when I say I'm angry, it's exceptionally painful. In a deeply uncommunicatable way. I can't say enough words, draw enough pictures, do enough songs and dances to accurately project into another human brain just how much... I have to say it, 'hate'... I'm experiencing in me these days. In the last few years, really.

I fully recognize I'm a dork. A geek. A nerd. I've been categorized by people in my life in some pretty odd ways. I've been called "irritatingly likable". I've been called an "appreciation monster". I've been called "the dude with the golden retriever energy". I try to take it all in stride because I recognize humans telling you about yourself is the best mirror you can ask for. Having another set of biological sensors filter into a brain, do some physics, and then spit out compressed air waves in the forms of words I have to translate is important externalization to see how I'm effecting the world around me. Some call it an external locus of control, or something. I call it doing the worst kind of science on myself. Take your seat somewhere in the spectrums that creates.

That's important, because I take myself seriously, and I take myself not seriously. I know I've been a lucky asshole my entire life. I've been able to feed myself sandwiches and grand sensory experiences by typing on various keyboards and producing things. People have told me in money and food that what I type has been useful enough to continue the trend, and I like to believe the choices I've made in trying to optimize the path between my brain-thoughts, my hands at the machine, and the other people at their own machines, has afforded me an 'earned' (whatever the hell that word means) me a sense of professionalism and accomplishment. I'm not super credentialed, I stopped higher-United-States-of-America-university-style education at the "Bachelor" level. I've been writing software for companies since then, way back in 2013-ish.

As the ramble continues, you'll see that I'm truly scattered. I started telling you I am very angry, and the last few paragraphs were almost self deprecating in who I am. But that's the point.

I need you to see that the angry I have is toward myself, and it is a reflection of what I have been a part of. I am a symptom and a disease, and it hurts. I'm overcorrecting, I'm flailing, and I'm realizing I'm underequipped for the world that's changing around me, and I fear a lot of other people are just like me out there because there truly is nothing new under the sun.

I haven't stated my thesis yet. If my IDH professors were reading this now they'd be livid with me, in a jovial way. I'd like to think they knew me pretty well, insofar as I allowed myself to be known. But here ya go, the thesis:

The industries of human ingenuity, idealized and practiced in science, human expression, community, and technological exponentiation, have transformed my hope of a future where what was going to come after I leave this universe in my current conscious state, to one I am fearful and despondent about; it is evidenced only by my personal experience, my tightening and worsening "social bubble", my self induced isolations, and my inability to understand my role in making the world better for myself and others.

I have watched my family members that told me about the nature of human cooperation and its importance to human coexistence slowly twist and morph into ghoulish mimics of themselves, subsumed by hateful targeted misinformation made more salient by their own personal confusions and misgivings of the world - scientific or otherwise. I have watched the world give rise to humans with so much excess in their lives that excess isn't an excessive enough word. "Billions" and "trillions" don't even make sense any more, high scores labeling how much a name is allowed to control you. I have watched societies decide amongst themselves that phrases like, What's wrong with xenophobic nationalism? are not just common, they're surrounded by people that agree with it. I have watched technologists surround themselves with the cold comfort of optimization and lie to themselves and others that the inevitable forward arrow of progress is going to be great for everyone - but mostly just trust-me-bro, you'll get yours too, soon. Just buy this one more thing and sign this here..

I have watched the coming and going of the excitement of *the second most phenomenal expansion of human capabilities* I have experienced in my life - first the explosion of the internet into human life, and now, the ability for almost any human anywhere to engage with a statistical model wrapped firmly around almost every form of human expression to afford exploration of one's own ideas comingled with others in fascinating ways, in the form of "large language models" and their ilk. And the going of the excitement was so fast, so... expected. The damn-near-entirety of the scaffolding these words sit here in were generated by that, and I can't even be excited about it.

Every time I generate text, every time I learn a new thing, every time I try to make something, it's in a world I am fundamentally incapable of not taking from anymore. I can't give back enough. I can't get *other people* to give back enough. The more I ask for, the more I don't want it. The more I beg for understanding, the more I see it's not there to be given, in the ways I want at least. I am inextricably bound to the world and that I happened to be born some 35 years ago, and I have so little to show for it but having lived a life where, I think, I really really hope, I haven't hurt many people. I know I have, simply by eating food others could have eaten, participating in fun sensory experiences others wouldn't even be able to dream of (and that's literally just going out to a 'nice restaurant' with 'fancy food', or visiting a 'theme park', or traveling in an airplane to another landmass to play board games with other humans beings. "just" did a lot of heavy lifting there, I know).

I'm angry... because I can't seem to understand why other people don't get that. They can't see it. They don't want to see it. They're so intensely full of their own life as they're living it, "can't" becomes a truly malignant incapability. And what makes it so, so awful, is that I work with and for these people.

This 'industry' is.. I don't even know anymore. It's everywhere and everything. It's in "politics". It's in "science". It's in "agriculture". It's in "wars". It's everything. There is no more escape from technology. We've filled up the planet's habitable spaces, and precious little is left in the form of melting landmasses and high-pressure aquatic zones we just haven't prioritized as income generating streams yet.

I don't know what to do about it. I don't know how to escape it or make it better. I don't know what statistics or numbers or graphs or papers or writings or names to "follow" anymore. I don't know how to lever the right things to tip the world back into a form of what I think might be a better balance. I don't know how to turn the evils of... whatever the fuck is happening in the global direction of political leadership.. away from humanity. I don't know how to affect change, I don't know what change to affect.

I do know that technology is everywhere and it's a culprit. Its billion-trillion 'owners' are the culprit. Fuck "it's not the gun that kills you, it's the ape with the gun that kills you" - it's both. Someone made a gun, someone evolved into whatever it is we are now, and now we're here. I do know that its the excess that's driving it. The more. The want. The not having enough, for some reason or another.

That's what's happening in tech. It's the people and the wanting. We don't need billionaires building electricity machines that pump toxicity into the air. We need thousandaires working together in Dunbar-number interconnected graphs of humans doing human things. We need centralized and decentralized everything. We need a humanity that doesn't hate itself enough to allow for "mine" and "yours" to be a fundamental driver of everyone's next actions.

... and that's why I'm so angry. I feel powerless. I feel as a cog. I feel as if the machine I'm in is a human grinder. I don't want to be a cog, and I can't help but be it. I see other cogs spinning, some in just as much anger and pain and hurt, and yet we spin on. We can't help but exist in the universe and grind humans because we were born, and we made the decision every minute of every day to not live in the service of a future where flourishing human existence was a goal, and not series-bound sci-fi fantasy for escaping into.

I'm angry because I realize that what's happening in tech is that it's killing humanity, and it's being done by people that are humans (well... I guess in a genetic sense, oo what a burn...) and I cannot. In any meaningful way. Any way I've found. Any way that motivates me any more... get them to stop.

I'm angry because I could do so much more and I'm not, because my brain has decided typing on this keyboard and putting more words in a crowded space of other words feels better. I'm angry that I'm not angry enough.

What's going on in tech is it's not tech anymore. It hasn't been for a long time. And we as humans seem to desire not to realize that. It's how we educate each other. It's how we feed ourselves and each other. It's how we heal ourselves and each other. "tech" is the idea that we can build something for ourselves and others that says, "Here, fellow human - here's something that makes the universe a little less sharp for you today". What's going on in tech isn't that anymore. It's about turning inactivity and compounding social financial interest into more for oneself.

Tech is sharpening the points of the world for people, then selling them cheap, ineffective gloves.

And that makes me really, really... really angry, fellow humans. Really...... really angry.