Without Our Consent
When I wrote last week’s round-up of “AI”-related news, I didn’t include any of OpenAI’s product releases, mostly because it’s 2025 and I’m exhausted by this game that tech companies and tech journalists continue to play: the former lobs a press release; the latter barely glances at the product but loudly pronounces “home run!” “This changes everything forever” over and over and over and over and over and over.
Of course, if everything’s a revolution, then nothing is.
And at the same time, if every update is earth-shattering -- if the media and management act as if every new gadget will be utterly transformative -- then it’s no surprise that we all feel destabilized by the onslaught of this messaging. (Not by the gadgets, to be clear; by the messaging.)
While “accelerationism” posits that all this technological change is exponential (and that this will result in rapid social, political, and economic change), this isn’t really “science”; this is storytelling.
"Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future. It may well be the most important disease of tomorrow. ... Unless intelligent steps are taken to combat it, millions of human beings will find themselves increasingly disoriented, progressively incompetent to deal rationally with their environments. The malaise, mass neurosis, irrationality, and free-floating violence already apparent in contemporary life are merely a foretaste of what may lie ahead unless we come to understand and treat this disease." That's Alvin Toffler in his 1970 bestseller Future Shock. The "things have been changing faster than ever" story has been knocking us off-kilter for over fifty years now.
We needn’t tell stories of future shock. We needn't tell stories of hyper-growth; we needn’t read stories of hyper-growth; we needn’t believe stories of hyper-growth. We can tell different stories, and from there, we can imagine and we can enact different futures – futures that are not reliant on the ever-expansion of extraction and exploitation, on the disorientation of speed, on the forever-expansion of the tech industry (and its embrace of techno-fascism).
That’s not to say that things haven’t changed, aren’t changing, won’t change. Everything changes (... “don’t be afraid,” as Al Swearengen once said.) But not all change -- not all technological change -- is good. Not all change -- not all technological change – is progress.
