Welcome to the Web, and the World

This will be fun.

“I <3 Free Wifi” — Havana street art, 2016

This weekly (or so) writing project seeks to answer a single question: is the internet good for us?

We already know the answer, or think we do. It’s good and bad and neither and somewhere in-between. But won’t it be fun to discover all the goods, bads, and uglies of it? To learn from experts and individuals everywhere about the big, small, increasingly interconnected world we inhabit online, and how it bleeds into the off-?

Some of you may wonder how I’d even dare ask this. The internet is progress after all, isn’t it? It’s technology! It’s a “never-ending cycle of Schumpeterian disruptive innovation bringing us to the next great stage of human development,” etc etc etc.

To ask if the internet is good for humanity is as much a waste of time, some might say, as wondering whether we’d all be better off without the invention of the electric light, or telephone, or car.

But we should ask these things. We’ve gained, and will gain, plenty from modern internet technology — but we’ll lose plenty with it too. And the longer we go without examining what we’re losing, the faster we’ll forget we ever had it.

And for that matter, the longer we go without recognizing the gains we’re making, the faster we’ll take them for granted too. The faster we’ll think of things as the way the world always was, and forget to be grateful for the sometimes amazing, space-age changes coming to our lives every day.

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To even question technological progress, of course, is to beg to be labeled a Luddite. The Luddites got their name from Ned Ludd, who helped lead hand weavers in riots protesting the introduction of the mechanized loom in early 19th century England. They feared that the new, fancy robot looms would put them out of a job — and well, they weren’t wrong.

But even the story of the Luddite riots is frequently almost always mischaracterized. We tend to hear about the long-run victory: a bunch of people wanted to halt progress, but thank goodness those silly gooses failed, because look at all the gains we got as a result!

What the Luddite story usually leaves out, however, is that the introduction of textile machinery led to very real hardship for the people protesting its very introduction — and for their kids, and their grandkids too.

As Carl Benedikt Frey points out in the preface to his book The Technology Trap, the Luddite story “is an accurate description of the long run — but in the long run, we're all dead.” 

He continues: 

“Three generations of working Englishmen were made worse off as technological creativity was allowed to thrive. And those who lost out did not live to see the day of the great enrichment.”

To call someone a Luddite is to accuse them of wanting to halt progress, to put brakes on the inevitable turning of the technological world. It’s usually meant as an insult — but should it be?

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I won’t focus solely on the automation of work in this newsletter — I probably won’t focus on it much at all, to be honest. But I think the Luddite example is an apt one: if we tell ourselves all new technology is great because 200 years down the line it will make the world amazing, it’s worth asking how we’re actually supposed to get there — how amazing will it be until then, and what amazing things will get left behind in the shift? And for that matter, with all the energy required by AI and cryptocurrency, will the human race even be around to enjoy whatever “progress” technology is meant to give us by then?

In light of these goals — to assess how technology is changing us — I won’t focus much on technology itself, but rather the ways in which it’s interacting with us, the people, who use it.

I recently came across David Noble’s 2011 book Forces of Production, which similarly examines technological change through a human lens. Like The Technology Trap, his book centers around automation and labor, and is much more US-centric than this newsletter. But I think this passage from the start of his book brilliantly sums up the ways I intend to think and talk about technology here.

It’s long, but good, so I’ll quote it at length:

This is not a book about American technology but about American society. The focus here is upon things but the real concern is with people, with the social relations which bind and divide them, with the shared dreams and delusions which inspire and blind them. For this is the substrate from which all of our technology emerges, the power and promise which give it shape and meaning. For some reason, this seemingly self-evident truth has been lost to modern Americans, who have come to believe instead that their technology shapes them rather than the other way around. Our culture objectifies technology and sets it apart and above human affairs. Here technology has come to be viewed as an autonomous process, having a life of its own which proceeds automatically, and almost naturally, along a singular path. Supposedly self-defining and independent of social power and purpose, technology appears to be an external force impinging upon society, as it were, from outside, determining events to which people must forever adjust.

In a society such as ours, which long ago abandoned social purpose to the automatic mechanism of the market, and attributed to things a supremacy over people ("things are in the saddle, and ride mankind," wrote Emerson), technology has readily assumed its fantastic appearance as the subject of the story.

Our technology is a choice, in other words. Let’s be sure we’re choosing well.

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So that’s what this newsletter will be about, more or less. And other things too! Like:

• Thoughts on what I’ve learned, and am still learning, after more than a decade researching internet use around the globe, and stories from ~real people~ whose lives the internet is changing, even in some of its furthest reaches

• Reviews of books to help understand how the internet is changing us all

• Interviews with brilliant academics, activists, and journalists working at the intersection of tech and the Global South 🔥🔥🔥

• Some fun travel stories, for levity: my own meditations on lying ill in a foreign hotel, say, or the fun of taking a crowded Bombay train instead of an Uber

• ~So much more~

And with every post, a theme song 🎉

Thank you — like I said up top, this is going to be great.