We’ve become so conditioned to thinking of the future in terms of tech that we have lost the capacity to imagine any other kind of future. I grew up on sci-fi, which was full of space lasers and FTL, all operating in 17th century ideas of “empire” and “colonies”. Sure, there were exceptions—Ursula le Guin imagined futures where humans cared about the forest and allowed themselves to change—but mostly it was the same people with better machines.
There’s something in tech, I think, that enshrines the past in ways beneath our consciousness. Perhaps it’s the concept of “memory”. In humans, “memory” is a creative process, where the past is re-enlivened with emotion and purpose, but also with randomness and newness; each act of remembering is unique. In a computer, “memory” is something fixed. A photo is always the same. the words we say are stuck there in black and white. The past is not a vaguely receding ocean of memories slowly merging into the unknowable, but crisp sharp images, as present as the present.
We talk about how a person’s data is used by tech companies to target ads and other creepy things. But that “data” is not you, it’s something of your past. Once upon a time, you went on Amazon to order a new toilet seat, and now you are haunted by images of toilet seats wherever you go. “You enjoyed this toilet seat, maybe you’d like this one!”
People get hauled over the coals for something they said on social media 6 years ago. There it is, as fresh and as something they said yesterday. Movie theaters are full of remakes and sequels. Twenty year old pop stars make songs that evoke that nostalgic era of the far-off eighties. (I was there: there was great music, but it didn’t sound like “eighties” music!)
Tech is for recycling things. Someone makes a button for something on the web. Great, copy the code, use that button. Businesses are obsessed with “best practices”, which means, “do whatever someone thinks worked in the past”. Social media is full of selfies that freeze smiles that are gone the moment the photo is over. And not to mention AI, which is just a statistical rendering of humanity’s digital past.
Sure, we do things in the present as well. We call such events “live”, apparently without irony. They stick out like islands in a sea of dead data.
It’s not that we shouldn’t remember the past. And it’s not that there aren’t plenty of forms of data that are really suited to being preserved in this way. Ancient scripture for example. The whole point is to preserve it unchanged, and the digital medium works just fine for that.
It’s the sheer weight of it all. Our imaginations have become so corrupted by the reality of tech that we can’t imagine a future except through its lens. Here again, the sci-fi authors were the prophets. They ran out of future in the seventies, and then we had cyberpunk: near-future dystopias dominated by evil tech corporations. I mean, you can’t fault them for accuracy.
Try it right now. Imagine a tomorrow where tech is not the center of things. Imagine a future where what evolves is humanity. Where we have better societies, better politics. Where human consciousness is more free, more open, more wise. Where we indulge in the creative possibilities of the human mind. Where tech, if we allow it to exist, serves humanity. Imagine a world with less, not more.
The irony of this is that, the further we go down the path where tech is all, the more we ensure a future where tech doesn’t exist at all. Tech, with its valorization of dead-end capitalist consumerism, is driving us towards climate collapse. And when things break down, the fanciest things will go the soonest. Tech is built of fragile, interdependent components, and is massively exposed to cascading failures. The whole system assumes more, more more; and when more isn’t in the pipeline, from where do we get the chips? Who is running those undersea cables? Who pays the bill for all those servers? Who fixes your electric vehicle when the company goes bust?
When the tech world breaks down, it’ll break down quickly. When your phone stops working, it’ll create a cascade of effects that render a whole range of other tech and services inoperable. When a million people’s phones stop working, what happens then? What happens when we realize that the entire tech industry for a generation has been focused on monetizing new features and no-one in corporate cares about redundancy and security?
You’ll want to order a meal online. But you can’t. So you’ll revert to the unthinkably primitive: going to places and talking to people. Or figuring out how to do things yourself.
Maybe it’s for the best. I don’t know. Maybe we needed this lesson in the horrors of the past. Maybe the wisdom of our age is the realization that, when the supposed gurus of the future, the genius innovators of our technological utopia, turned out to be eugenicists and misogynists stuck in fantasies of empire and colonialism, for whom “freedom” means the freedom to be Nazis, it is time to shake our heads and clear our minds; time to wake from their nightmares and dream new dreams of our own.
I find myself wondering what the Amish communities in the United States might think of threads like this, but then they can’t access them since they’ve actually given up the “tech” that is castigated. 
can be useful to help humanity build & create, … up explosive tech to the point of a nuke 
tho and then it serves no purpose except pure destruction.
He was warned for years too. I think the kids need to see these ‘deep fake’ reveals for themselves to really smack them in the face with what they are being lured in to, in a way that words can’t impact them. 
Using a non tech platform to talk about the problems of being mired in tech is likely to reach the wrong audience.