I posit to my meager human brain, particularly as I entail the freedom of doing so—I apologize for the colloquialism—“Why are we (creatures) ostensibly so dumb?” After all, there seems to be a stringent barometer of deducing one’s intellectual prowess in our society; that is, if one succeeds in the meritocratic ladder, ultimately being accredited with a credential from higher education, they, at best, are worthy of postulating what is right or wrong, regardless of either their moral compass or clandestine endeavors, eventually—folly becomes substantiated by ones “superficially” ordained intellect, just because, “the smart people said it”.
Which is why, in the recent past, with the entrenched ideal in contemporary society that market triumphalism denotes supreme merit—or, in simpler terms, “success.” I personally ponder, has the society relegated itself, especially its mental faculty, to a product created via our behest, which, in essence, personifies moral ineptness? To extrapolate, due to the rather bizarre fixation on the tussle between contrarian political machinations, we have, in effect, defenestrated the consciousness of the great insurmountable power that has been delegated carelessly to Machiavellian tech firms.
As it is, while gazing at “success” vis-à-vis the fashionable standard, needless to say, tech firms (in this epoch), mainly the numerous ones concentrated in the United States, are omnipotent. In market terms, which is capitalization (USD terms [LINK]), the most valued firm is Microsoft, with a gargantuan cap of 3.49 trillion; the others are as follows: Nvidia, valued at 3.45 trillion; Apple, valued at 3.045 trillion; Amazon, valued at 2.26 trillion; Alphabet (the parent company of Google), valued at 2.11 trillion; and Meta, valued at 1.75 trillion, et al.
Based on the above numbers, prima facie, these firms have money to a degree that may lead anyone lost in numbers. On the other hand, they also have greater economic heft compared to the coffers of nation-states—the list of countries can be as long as one may certainly seek. To put it broadly, these companies have succumbed to becoming entities that are larger than life, just like the many dystopic caricatures of “the tech overlords” depicted in some of the fiction novels of the past century.
So literally speaking, where am I heading with my argument?
In the offset I have alluded to three pertinent facets: first, our idea of merit, which is “to succeed in one is to be successful in all”; the seemingly ambiguous loss in our consciousness; and lastly, the potency of technology firms, which are also in tandem monopolies of a kind (may it be phones, AI, search, commerce, computing, hardware, and software, etc.) in their own nature.
Okay. For a starter, rather than delving into the philosophical predilection of these firms intricately, I believe the current state of affairs, particularly stemming from the ecosystem in the United States of America, to be as such:
That is to say, many in the higher echelon of Silicon Valley espouse ideas that are strikingly concerning. From their adherence to nihilistic and stoic dispositions towards life and their dictum that techno-libertarianism, a government reminiscent of a tech firm, is a superlative to the contemporary framework of liberal constitutionalism.
Such dogma implies that the ethos that permeates around the process of making the technologies “we” are intrinsically, in this day and age, dependent on, from all the myriad of the trivial aspects of life, like texting, to the sophisticated aspects, for instance, conventional warfare-related, is being developed by a cohort of individuals who not only wield immense latitude (more than the industrialists in the Gilded Age) but also adhere to the notion that the entirety of the world, ranging from what they deem the dumb politicians to the lousy wage earners and the whining academics, are subservient to them, as in their minds, they are the sole winners, and “we”…..
In their eyes, “we” are the losers—which, such an abstraction, at its core, is corrosive to the common good.
Ultimately, giving a genuine (in their terms), pretext for an autocratic rule, by the “winners”; their diktat, is to be followed, without even a sliver of second guessing; as under their guise, “we” lack the intellectual prowess.
If my writing sounds ludicrous. I yearn it did.
But sadly, we have transcended to a phase in which its ubiquity is still shadowed by a farcical veneer of goodwill albeit, resulting in less attention to this phenomenon.
The onus is also on us. It is a pity that we still sporadically, get dazzled by the topical technological developments, that inherently is deteriorating not only our politics, but is also hampering our ability to reason for the furthering of our civilization; making our lives and its worth meagre to such a bleak point, where our sense of gratification, is symbiotic to a like, or heart on social platforms; and employment—the idea of work, contingent to a set of mathematical predictions, namely artificial intelligence.
Besides, Just listen to, or even read, the actions taken by many of the previously thought-altruistic, hippie-type technologists of Palo Alto, from Mr. Musk, the richest guy in the world, annihilating the lives of the poorest, to other thought leaders like Mr. Thiel and Mr. Andreessen pontificating their “supposedly” all-encompassing intellect as the arbiter of the “good” and “bad”.
In addition, other than advocating for a techno-utopia. In part, they exude the hubris of “winners”, and social media platforms (Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat) not only give credence to their diabolical impulses (of the aforementioned and the many more individuals) but also are perpetually devising fictitious binaries among people that once were bound with certain core, abstract, yet forward-looking ideas, the bedrock principles of love, compassion, virtue, wisdom, and a degree of clarity about what is true and to the contrary. Our collective equation for wisdom is a misnomer. It needs a 180-degree shift.
At last, metaphorically speaking, dark matter, oblivious to many, revolves around us. Without much attention, it is giving fruition to most, if not all, of the social phenomena, ranging from populism, social toxicity, and economic distress to the loss of a coherent cultural canon.
Before landing on Mars, we ought to actualize who we are, what we stand for, and if the future is, alas, destined to be marred by the evisceration of reasoning and entrenchment of techno-feudalism.
The price for our submission is, by no stretch of the imagination, quantifiable. Let’s cement the idea of solidarity and stop the arbitrary dependence on tech predicated upon the destruction of “us”.
Above all, we are not dumb except just distracted.
