During a snowy winter break, while cuddled up with all three of our adult children temporarily at home, we binge-watched Pluribus, a moody television drama that converts the ambient dread and alienation of our current political moment into a science fiction allegory for a planetary takeover by artificial intelligence.
Our middle daughter, a senior in college who had just taken a class on the history of the Industrial Revolution, saw parallels between the threats posed by technology now and the plight of artisans in the 1800s who were pushed aside by factories and mass production. When I began to tell our youngest child, who just finished her first semester of college, about the Luddites and how that term became a pejorative, my middle daughter interrupted. It’s not a pejorative now, she said. There are Luddite clubs popping up all over the country on college campuses. Students are trading smartphones for flip phones, getting off social media, and seeking a more analogue and physically and emotionally connected way of living in the world.
It struck me as very good news that there’s a movement among college students to reject the commodification of their personal lives and to cultivate a more organic, face-to-face experience of community—that terribly abused word that has been stretched beyond all meaning in our atomized, brand-conscious society.
I went digging around in the basement for a copy of No Logo by Naomi Klein, who offered an early diagnosis of the insidious corporate promotion of “self-branding.” Two of our kids have been reading Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, Klein’s book that expands on that theme and helps explain the rise of rightwing populist health nuts and the way the MAGA and MAHA movements took over the space abandoned by Democrats, who failed to take seriously the alienation and paranoia generated by a technocratic elite, growing inequality, and the increasingly intimate, routine surveillance we all live with now.
In Pluribus, the irascible heroine fights to maintain her sense of agency and individuality in a world taken over by zombie-like groupthinkers.
The feeling is familiar. Loss of agency in our corporate-run, AI-slop-infected social media world is surely driving a lot of people crazy. It has to be part of the explanation for our current slide toward authoritarianism. Fans of President Donald Trump and anti-vaccine Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with their T-shirts declaring that they are not “sheeple,” have something in common with leftwing tech skeptics worried about AI eliminating jobs and destroying democracy. Both groups see themselves as independent thinkers and rebels against an oppressive majority culture.
In the new attention economy, rebellion is commodified and monetized. Whether you are in a leftwing or a rightwing silo, you’re fed a steady stream of outrage and AI-generated snippets tagged with the suggestion that you “smash the like button” to express yourself.
As my daughter and her peers are experiencing it, generative AI is an attack on critical thinking. Stressed-out students who are tempted to let ChatGPT write their papers are cheating themselves out of an education. My daughter was taken aback when one of her professors asked a class to use AI to write LinkedIn profiles after taking a test using AI to diagnose their strengths and job skills. Where is that going? After studying the Industrial Revolution my daughter said she’s convinced that embracing technology with the sole aim of making our lives more convenient and easier only leads to more alienation. “So I really think AI should be banned from the classroom,” she said.
Outside the classroom, we need to spend a lot more time thinking about what we want to get out of technology instead of just letting it drag us into an uncertain future.
Here in the Midwest, we are experiencing a wave of euphoric predictions about our coming conversion from breadbasket and dairyland to “Silicon Prairie.” Tech companies are offering huge incentives to towns and counties to build enormous, energy-sucking data centers.
In Port Washington, Wisconsin, multiple people, including a member of Great Lakes Neighbors United, were arrested at a city council meeting on December 2 after speaking out against a $15 billion data center proposed by tech giants OpenAI and Oracle.
Data centers, which various local officials have promoted as job-creation engines, actually require few employees, massively increase energy costs for local ratepayers, and suck up huge quantities of water.
They are also necessary to fuel the giant projected growth of AI, the effects of which we should stop to consider before it’s too late. Good for the young people who are rejecting the plan of technocrats spoon-feeding them ideas, and even the identities they inhabit as their “personal brands.”
Not only is the siloing of political conversation contributing to toxic polarization in the United States, the curation of identities based on certain political views makes it harder for people to abandon those views, even when it becomes clear that they don’t make sense.
The Internet troll who is currently running the U.S. government, enriching himself at the expense of the economic, physical, and moral health of the nation, is able to do so in part because the very people who are suffering the greatest losses under his policies are so deeply and personally committed to the MAGA brand. We badly need to wake up from this nightmare and start thinking for ourselves.
In his book How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion, David McRaney explores what it takes to break through people’s deep commitment to certain beliefs as a core part of their identity. Browbeating them with facts doesn’t change their minds. Deep listening, allowing people to butt their heads against the internal inconsistencies in their own thinking and come to their own conclusions, and most of all, offering them a way to change their minds without losing their sense of self are the keys.
In her study of industrialization, my daughter came to the conclusion that all tech innovations are framed as beneficial to the people who must adapt to them. She read Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City by Diana Montaño and was troubled by the history of electric trams running over people—whom Montaño described as “trapped under the wheels of modernity,” and whom middle- and upper-class Mexicans derided as uneducated, rural, poor people who didn’t understand how to function in the modern city. Electrification reinforced segregated barrios, exacerbated class divisions, enriched the already wealthy, and failed to bring about the universal benefits ascribed to it.
Our current grappling with AI is similar. If you’re not with it, you’re behind the times. It will supposedly bring great benefits. But what’s driving it is corporate greed. And there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. Perhaps chief among those reasons is the way it undermines skepticism itself, a critical ingredient in democracy and human fulfillment.