Excellent piece! I've been thinking about this a lot.
My sense of direction has tanked since I started using WAZE, and I don't even believe it helps me avoid traffic anymore. Instead, I think it's controlling the flow of traffic while it keeps tabs on all of us.
Life on auto-pilot is void of meaningful effort and it shows. There's a sense of adventure and accomplishment that comes with figuring things out and many of us have lost touch with that part of ourselves. Convenience makes us think of effort as burden. The path of least resistance is designed by globalist technocrats, will be paved with graphene and leads to digital slavery.
Josh, Your best piece yet. The core idea here that needs some specifics (you have started) is how one draws the line between using technology (which almost all of us do extensively) and being captive to it.
The other underlying observation that could stand development is "who is helping you". I was a loud supporter of early Internet-based support for painfully repetitive/inconvenient life processes. People would say "But then Google will know all about you!". I noted that my local shopkeeper knew all about me (vis-a-vis whatever wares they carried) and the more they knew, the better job they could do to help me out. The same applied to Amazon/Google/etc. very early on. As long as their motivations were to find me things I was more likely to like/appreciate/buy we were basically aligned.
The problem completely changes when the government decides that it wants to use this stuff NOT to provide you what you want but to control you. That completely changes the equation in a radical way. If we could assuredly keep the government out and reset the incentives I would modify my views from where they have eventuated.. The power of any of these tools to be appropriately responsive is not only deprecated but actually turned against one when the government gets involved in any way. The government is NEVER your friend. So we lose much of the capability we should have.
Perhaps impossible to pull off, but the ability to block the government from things we do (and perhaps this is the one time in my life where the will might be there) will determine the trajectory of many of these elements as people wake up and understand what is at stake.
Why are you being so nice to me? It makes me uncomfortable! 😉
But seriously - your observation about the distinction between beneficial tech convenience and government control is crucial. Like you, I once optimistically believed tech could democratize access and improve our lives - I spent decades building that future. The local shopkeeper analogy is apt; there was an implied social contract of mutual benefit.
But as I explored in a piece on the Tech-Industrial Complex - written for Brownstone a few months ago - that social contract may have been illusory from the start (https://brownstone.org/articles/anatomy-of-the-tech-industrial-complex/). These platforms weren't just co-opted by government control - many may have been seeded by intelligence agencies from their inception. This forces us to grapple with whether we were all useful idealists in someone else's long game.
The question now isn't just how to keep the government out of tech (though that's vital), but how to rebuild systems that truly serve human flourishing rather than control. I'm wrestling with my own role in helping build what I now see as a digital panopticon. Hope lies in people like you who understood the risks early and can help chart a better course. My belief is that if we have any chance, the future will be decentralized.
"We must actively cultivate independence alongside innovation...True freedom isn't found in having everything at our fingertips—it's in maintaining the capability to live without those conveniences when necessary."
Lots of great lines in this piece, Josh! You are insightful. I've been saying that I wish we could have the convenience of our technologies without the menace of those who want to use them to control us.
Incidentally, my first piece published at Brownstone was "Convenience Is An Opiate."
Lori! I had no idea you were reading but thanks for the kind words.
Yes - the challenge is finding that sweet spot between technological convenience and maintaining our independence. Looking forward to reading 'Convenience Is An Opiate' - sounds like we're thinking along similar lines. I'd love to discuss in greater detail sometime.
Josh - discovered you via ZeroHedge including your Substack article in their feed. I'm hitching on, agree with what you're saying, and looking forward to reading more. I'd think many ZeroHedge readers might prove naturally aligned with you, but I'm certainly thankful for the introduction.
Great piece here Josh. The erosion of personal liberty in exchange for convenience has been a gradual transfer of wealth from the pockets of the poor masses to the coffers of the few. When you deny your agency and externalize your problem solving, you are right, skills atrophy for those who made the exchange but worse, the next generation inheriting the convenient best practices will never know they could develop those skills. AI presents the greatest wealth redstribution mechanism the planet has faced yet under the guise of a convenience that raises the bar of average quality of life, but only along prespecified vectors. The prior two huge events happened when hunter gatherers became agrarian societies, and when farmers eventually became factory workers - a streamlined vehicle for consumption at the cost of individual agency with wealth directed to landowners and factory owners respectively.
A thought experiment for anyone who wishes - try as hard as you can to live a normal day but stay off the digital grid for just 24 hours by being hyper conscious of how you are tracked - smart devices, CCTV at a cash register, ATM or credit card transaction, EZ Pass, traffic cameras, digital maps, anything on your phone/computer/smart tv, access key fobs/cards, etc. These are the accretive conveniences over generation making your autonomy impossible and liberty futile. There will be a time when only some people can afford to pay top dollar to remain off the grid, paying for the liberty that the constitution once guaranteed each of us.
Thanks for chiming in, GBattle. I've always appreciated your takes on this sort of thing.
Your historical take on this puts things in stark perspective. That grid experiment is eye-opening - it's wild how what was just normal daily life 20 years ago now feels almost impossible to navigate.
And, privacy becoming a luxury good is spot on. The rest of us are paying for "convenience" with our liberty, one digital transaction at a time.
Josh -- regarding your dryer purchase: Here's a clip from my 2016 book, "May I Ask a Technical Question:" "We have digital technology in devices and in places most people don’t even consider. … Many years ago, I bought my first “digital” toaster from a kitchen appliance store where it was sitting behind a display card bragging that the toaster contained a “computer chip.” When that toaster broke down faster than any kitchen appliance I’d ever owned, I made a quick switch back to the “chipless” variety—the exact kind I’d watched my grandfather use and occasionally repair for decades using tools no more exotic than screw drivers and pliers. We found that our toasted bread tasted identical using either machine, and the added reliability and ease of repair made the non-digital toaster the winner.”
Love this parallel. Yes, your toaster story perfectly captures what I've been seeing with appliances. It's fascinating how we were sold digital as an upgrade, when often it just meant 'more ways to fail' and 'impossible to fix.'
The comparison to your grandfather's repairable toaster reminds me of what we've lost in terms of right-to-repair and basic mechanical understanding. Makes me think we need a return to designs where 'simple' and 'reliable' matter more than 'smart.'
Josh - Thanks for your work. I count my book and your latest article in the (struggling) genre of cyberskepticism. I hope you write more in this genre. I was a USAF pilot; I flew in the most "digitized" cockpit of its day at one point. Every flight instrument - primary or otherwise - could be brought up on one of many computer displays. Fantastic, for example, to see your vital attitude indicator brightly displayed and 3 times its normal size. Until the lights went out (and they did - that story is also in the 2016 book just mentioned). Reality hit home in a hurry. RELIABILITY. The forgotten "ility" as we used to call vital IT capabilities in my work on the DoD's (bone-dry) topic of Advanced Distributed Learning. (See https://scorm.com/scorm-explained/business-of-scorm/benefits-of-scorm/ for an explanation of these "ilities".) IMO, at least some of the vital proactive measures you suggest we could forego if we could just get make "reliability" a household name once more. Tongue-in-cheek: "death to planned obsolesence" (or something like that...).
Your USAF experience really drives home the stakes of reliability vs digitization - when system failure means more than just inconvenience, those tradeoffs become crystal clear. I love the "death to planned obsolescence" rallying cry - it doesn't feel tongue-in-cheek at all when you consider what's at stake.
Excellent piece! I've been thinking about this a lot.
My sense of direction has tanked since I started using WAZE, and I don't even believe it helps me avoid traffic anymore. Instead, I think it's controlling the flow of traffic while it keeps tabs on all of us.
Life on auto-pilot is void of meaningful effort and it shows. There's a sense of adventure and accomplishment that comes with figuring things out and many of us have lost touch with that part of ourselves. Convenience makes us think of effort as burden. The path of least resistance is designed by globalist technocrats, will be paved with graphene and leads to digital slavery.
Josh, Your best piece yet. The core idea here that needs some specifics (you have started) is how one draws the line between using technology (which almost all of us do extensively) and being captive to it.
The other underlying observation that could stand development is "who is helping you". I was a loud supporter of early Internet-based support for painfully repetitive/inconvenient life processes. People would say "But then Google will know all about you!". I noted that my local shopkeeper knew all about me (vis-a-vis whatever wares they carried) and the more they knew, the better job they could do to help me out. The same applied to Amazon/Google/etc. very early on. As long as their motivations were to find me things I was more likely to like/appreciate/buy we were basically aligned.
The problem completely changes when the government decides that it wants to use this stuff NOT to provide you what you want but to control you. That completely changes the equation in a radical way. If we could assuredly keep the government out and reset the incentives I would modify my views from where they have eventuated.. The power of any of these tools to be appropriately responsive is not only deprecated but actually turned against one when the government gets involved in any way. The government is NEVER your friend. So we lose much of the capability we should have.
Perhaps impossible to pull off, but the ability to block the government from things we do (and perhaps this is the one time in my life where the will might be there) will determine the trajectory of many of these elements as people wake up and understand what is at stake.
Why are you being so nice to me? It makes me uncomfortable! 😉
But seriously - your observation about the distinction between beneficial tech convenience and government control is crucial. Like you, I once optimistically believed tech could democratize access and improve our lives - I spent decades building that future. The local shopkeeper analogy is apt; there was an implied social contract of mutual benefit.
But as I explored in a piece on the Tech-Industrial Complex - written for Brownstone a few months ago - that social contract may have been illusory from the start (https://brownstone.org/articles/anatomy-of-the-tech-industrial-complex/). These platforms weren't just co-opted by government control - many may have been seeded by intelligence agencies from their inception. This forces us to grapple with whether we were all useful idealists in someone else's long game.
The question now isn't just how to keep the government out of tech (though that's vital), but how to rebuild systems that truly serve human flourishing rather than control. I'm wrestling with my own role in helping build what I now see as a digital panopticon. Hope lies in people like you who understood the risks early and can help chart a better course. My belief is that if we have any chance, the future will be decentralized.
"We must actively cultivate independence alongside innovation...True freedom isn't found in having everything at our fingertips—it's in maintaining the capability to live without those conveniences when necessary."
Lots of great lines in this piece, Josh! You are insightful. I've been saying that I wish we could have the convenience of our technologies without the menace of those who want to use them to control us.
Incidentally, my first piece published at Brownstone was "Convenience Is An Opiate."
https://brownstone.org/articles/convenience-is-an-opiate/
Lori! I had no idea you were reading but thanks for the kind words.
Yes - the challenge is finding that sweet spot between technological convenience and maintaining our independence. Looking forward to reading 'Convenience Is An Opiate' - sounds like we're thinking along similar lines. I'd love to discuss in greater detail sometime.
I'd like that!
Josh - discovered you via ZeroHedge including your Substack article in their feed. I'm hitching on, agree with what you're saying, and looking forward to reading more. I'd think many ZeroHedge readers might prove naturally aligned with you, but I'm certainly thankful for the introduction.
Great piece here Josh. The erosion of personal liberty in exchange for convenience has been a gradual transfer of wealth from the pockets of the poor masses to the coffers of the few. When you deny your agency and externalize your problem solving, you are right, skills atrophy for those who made the exchange but worse, the next generation inheriting the convenient best practices will never know they could develop those skills. AI presents the greatest wealth redstribution mechanism the planet has faced yet under the guise of a convenience that raises the bar of average quality of life, but only along prespecified vectors. The prior two huge events happened when hunter gatherers became agrarian societies, and when farmers eventually became factory workers - a streamlined vehicle for consumption at the cost of individual agency with wealth directed to landowners and factory owners respectively.
A thought experiment for anyone who wishes - try as hard as you can to live a normal day but stay off the digital grid for just 24 hours by being hyper conscious of how you are tracked - smart devices, CCTV at a cash register, ATM or credit card transaction, EZ Pass, traffic cameras, digital maps, anything on your phone/computer/smart tv, access key fobs/cards, etc. These are the accretive conveniences over generation making your autonomy impossible and liberty futile. There will be a time when only some people can afford to pay top dollar to remain off the grid, paying for the liberty that the constitution once guaranteed each of us.
Thanks for chiming in, GBattle. I've always appreciated your takes on this sort of thing.
Your historical take on this puts things in stark perspective. That grid experiment is eye-opening - it's wild how what was just normal daily life 20 years ago now feels almost impossible to navigate.
And, privacy becoming a luxury good is spot on. The rest of us are paying for "convenience" with our liberty, one digital transaction at a time.
Josh -- regarding your dryer purchase: Here's a clip from my 2016 book, "May I Ask a Technical Question:" "We have digital technology in devices and in places most people don’t even consider. … Many years ago, I bought my first “digital” toaster from a kitchen appliance store where it was sitting behind a display card bragging that the toaster contained a “computer chip.” When that toaster broke down faster than any kitchen appliance I’d ever owned, I made a quick switch back to the “chipless” variety—the exact kind I’d watched my grandfather use and occasionally repair for decades using tools no more exotic than screw drivers and pliers. We found that our toasted bread tasted identical using either machine, and the added reliability and ease of repair made the non-digital toaster the winner.”
Love this parallel. Yes, your toaster story perfectly captures what I've been seeing with appliances. It's fascinating how we were sold digital as an upgrade, when often it just meant 'more ways to fail' and 'impossible to fix.'
The comparison to your grandfather's repairable toaster reminds me of what we've lost in terms of right-to-repair and basic mechanical understanding. Makes me think we need a return to designs where 'simple' and 'reliable' matter more than 'smart.'
Josh - Thanks for your work. I count my book and your latest article in the (struggling) genre of cyberskepticism. I hope you write more in this genre. I was a USAF pilot; I flew in the most "digitized" cockpit of its day at one point. Every flight instrument - primary or otherwise - could be brought up on one of many computer displays. Fantastic, for example, to see your vital attitude indicator brightly displayed and 3 times its normal size. Until the lights went out (and they did - that story is also in the 2016 book just mentioned). Reality hit home in a hurry. RELIABILITY. The forgotten "ility" as we used to call vital IT capabilities in my work on the DoD's (bone-dry) topic of Advanced Distributed Learning. (See https://scorm.com/scorm-explained/business-of-scorm/benefits-of-scorm/ for an explanation of these "ilities".) IMO, at least some of the vital proactive measures you suggest we could forego if we could just get make "reliability" a household name once more. Tongue-in-cheek: "death to planned obsolesence" (or something like that...).
Sorry I missed this earlier, Jeff.
Your USAF experience really drives home the stakes of reliability vs digitization - when system failure means more than just inconvenience, those tradeoffs become crystal clear. I love the "death to planned obsolescence" rallying cry - it doesn't feel tongue-in-cheek at all when you consider what's at stake.