Techno-optimism

1. Before our tools, human life was short, exposed, weighed down by toil. The plough, the printing press, the vaccine, the engine: each technology widened what a human being can know, do, and hope for. This is the meaning of Descartes's project, which charged knowledge with making us as masters and possessors of nature.
2. The feed you were scrolling tonight belongs to this lineage: never has so vast a share of knowledge, of works, of distant voices been within arm's reach. What we call distraction is the flip side of an unheard-of abundance.
3. And every novelty, in its day, caused fear: Plato already dreaded that writing would ruin memory. Yet we would not trade writing for forgetfulness. The present anxiety is surely, too, the discomfort of a threshold.

Therefore So to bet on technology is not naivety: it is to recognize the lever that, alone, has kept its promises of emancipation.

1. Grant the optimist his starting point: our means of acting, producing, communicating have grown as never before. But he at once concludes that our condition has improved, and it is that step which must be examined.
2. For a means is worth only the end it serves: having more tools makes life better only if those tools serve what makes life good. To multiply means without questioning ends is to gain in power, not necessarily in happiness or freedom.
3. And the very power that removes old ills gives rise to new ones: it creates needs we never had, dependencies, unprecedented forms of fatigue and solitude. The reckoning is thus not the simple addition the optimist assumes, and nothing guarantees it tips the right way for life itself.

Therefore So from the growth of our means one cannot conclude the progress of our condition: it is a leap from power to the good life that nothing secures.

1. The optimist treats technology's ills as passing defects: to every problem, more ingenuity, a better setting, a smarter app. This is solutionism, the faith that every technical problem has a technical solution.
2. But the feed that held you tonight is not a clumsy tool to be perfected: it does exactly what it was designed to do. Holding you is not its flaw, it is its trade, for it is on your attention that those who build it make their living.
3. To hope, then, that the industry thriving on this mechanism will correct it of its own accord is to set the fox to guard the henhouse. Improvement may come, but not from refining the tool alone.

Therefore So the optimist is mistaken in filing under malfunctions what is, in truth, the machine's very purpose.