Progress Delivered

Note to readers: Hello, everyone! My apologies for the posting hiatus. I’ve been working on some longer-term projects that involve shifting to more narrative, reported work. I hope to have more of that soon. In the meantime, thanks so much for your continued support.

I’ve read two books recently that have completely altered my worldview. Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine and Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress. Both are, at their core, books about technology. But they diverge significantly from the mainstream critiques of technology that dominate our discourse. Kingsnorth and Harrington aren’t asking, are screens bad? Or is app-based gig economy labor exploitative? They’ve moved onto a level of systemic critique the mainstream discourse rarely touches, and it’s much more in touch with what it means to be alive in this system right now.

It’s not uncommon to be a remote worker who spends ten hours alone in a city apartment and unwinds at night by ordering takeout, which arrives via a DoorDash driver who “contactlessly” leaves it at the front door. Instead of going outside to see if the food has arrived, the remote worker checks the app for confirmation. He then turns on Netflix, opens the food, and passively scrolls social media until late into the night.

Brick and mortar retail businesses, once started with hopes of being community staples, now face fewer customers, and the squeeze forces them to adopt “free delivery on orders over $30.” Order by 2 p.m. to get your delivery the same day! Harried retail workers learn new apps to process the orders, while delivery drivers, people from all walks of life who have lost stable work, trickle into the store, heads down, phone in hand.

Liberal millennial women who think of themselves as secular have been taught to worship a form of feminist progress that meant climbing corporate and institutional career ladders. Big tech companies now incentivize and pay for reproductive assistance technologies, including egg freezing, to bring in “female talent.”

This is Western life in the 2020s. I’ve been all three of these people.

It seems obvious and intuitive to most people now that screens are bad, that they are fundamentally making us sadder, more isolated, and more distractible. Anyone who has worked in or been around the app-based gig economy knows it’s exploitative. Though Harrington’s critique of feminism remains largely taboo, even this seems to be changing. As more millennial women, myself included, look around at the realities of our career-obsessed lives and wonder what this was all for, Harrington’s arguments around the priorities of the feminist movement are actually not that radical.

Most discourse involves admitting technology is doing some harm but still assumes that its ascendance is inevitable and necessary. We can and should regulate gig work and screens, but we’re missing something more profound by not viewing the reality that technology has become an organizing principle of our lives as perhaps the most fundamentally political question of our time. Here again, is what sets these authors apart from the mainstream discourse.

Why we sustain being governed like this at all has a few possible explanations. One, common to the left, is that we’ve become too economically precarious and atomized to organize or meaningfully push back against any of it. I think there is good reason to believe this is true. Another, the lane of Harrington and Kingsnorth, is that an ideology, an almost religious-like adherence to “faith in progress,” has made it very hard to question or assert visions of “the good life” that fall outside of what can even be articulated without sounding reactionary.

Embedded in this is the idea that “progress” means moving forward, and that has become inextricably linked, whether we like it or not, with advances in technology. Both writers are critical not just of the technological developments that have shaped modern life, but of the ideology that justifies them. This idea of progress has perhaps been the single greatest story we’ve told ourselves in Western liberal democracies. Many of us believe it, or once did, structuring our lives around the assumption that history moves forward toward some greater good. Technology, in turn, fused with capitalist technocracy to become the default way we measure progress.

Kingsnorth and Harrington’s critiques challenge the authority of the technocrat. At such a level of abstraction, policy wonks and CEOs, with their data and studies, begin to seem less relevant and increasingly detached from the grounded realities of people’s lives.

To be clear, I’m not endorsing every idea these authors have espoused. I do think they are on a noble path. It’s a question that will have to be answered if the left is to build any sort of movement that addresses the realities of our time. This means asking how we can critique the parts of modernity that have been enabled by technology and have left us profoundly unfree, not just in our economic situations, but in our human quest for connection and meaning.

We don’t need to look into the near future to define a dystopian technoreality. The one we live in now is pretty close. This is where the gap between ideology and grounded reality is most jarring. We move forward in the name of progress, efficiency, liberation, and freedom, but we live in isolation, in dependency, and we are largely stripped of the agency to do anything about it. This is why most people can feel something is “off,” but naming it is much harder.

To obscure this further, the way we are taught to perceive politics, which has essentially become a 24/7 reality TV show, is yet another technological interface that mediates our reality. One of the most dystopian iterations of this happened yesterday, when a grandmother of ten, wearing a branded “DoorDash Grandma” shirt, was sent on a political stunt sanctioned by the mega-tech company and the White House to deliver McDonald’s to the Oval Office. Here the state and the tech companies are essentially one, staging a performance of their “no tax on tips” backdoor legislation that helped this woman pay for her husband’s cancer treatment by delivering for DoorDash.

Where Kingsnorth and Harrington deserve credit is in saying the entire system is wrong. That this way of organizing life is inhuman, an affront to the basic interpersonal structures that humans have derived meaning from for centuries. They offer a bit of light in a very dark time.