How the tech monsters mutilate our lives

For one, parents, children are disconnected. Photo: Tanya Goodin source

Under the headline "3 tech giants report combined profits of more than $50B", the Associated Press reported on July 28:

Three tech companies — Apple, Microsoft and Google owner Alphabet — reported combined profits of more than $50 billion in the April-June quarter, underscoring their unparalleled influence and success at reshaping the way we live.

Although these companies make their money in different ways, the results served as another reminder of the clout they wield and why government regulators are growing increasingly concerned about whether they have become too powerful.

The massive profits pouring into each company also illustrated why they have a combined market value of $6.4 trillion - more than double their collective value when the COVID-19 pandemic started 16 months ago.

That "reshaping" of our lives - and each and every one of us is impacted - is getting a lot of serious-minded attention, so concerning are the effects on the well-being of individuals and of nations as a whole.

One solid reflection on how the new technologies, especially the smartphone, which allows any user to easily connect to the worldwide web, and to social media, comes from a social commentator who has been sounding the alarm for several years.

Last year Rod Dreher was at a conference where he talked with friends who teach at Christian colleges:  

I wish — do I ever wish! — that most of you could have been sitting in on this. These are professors who are on the front lines, and what they report ought to blast to smithereens the complacent piety of most older American Christians.

Pornography is destroying a generation. It really is. One of the profs told me that his female students can’t get dates. Young men aren’t interested in relationships. Those who do ask women out tell them at the outset that they (the women) have to be cool with their pornography habits. From what I gathered, we are dealing with a generation of males who are failing to become men. Slavery to sensory input from screens — porn and video games — is keeping them stuck at around age 14. These are young males who attend conservative Christian colleges. This is a problem so far beyond our usual categories that we can scarcely comprehend it. 

On an earlier occasion Dreher told an Australian audience during a book tour how the new technologies have created a social environment where "radical individualism is the new normal":

The old bonds of family and community have mostly dissolved. It is no longer surprising

news that we in America don’t know our neighbors...[An old liberal friend] teaches high school in a small town in the South – deep Trump country. She told me about a year ago that things are getting better and better. Why’s that? I asked. “We have more and more gay couples in the school,” she said. “And more kids are coming out as transgender.” 

I asked her how that played in her small, conservative town. She laughed. “These parents have no clue what their kids are into.” 

Stories like this are playing out all over America. I could give you a thousand examples of 
fragmentation, but that one sticks in my mind, for a couple of reasons. The town where this
takes place is in the most conservative part of the U.S.. This is the place to where people like to think they can run to escape the decadence. The local school – the main institution in the town, the one that holds the local society together – has taken it upon itself to identify and exacerbate the break between the parents’ values and their children’s, on the matter of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Dreher's punchline is this:

Parents are so disconnected from the lives of their children – who are being catechized not by church or family, but by social media and popular culture – that they aren’t aware of the deep crises of identity these kids are having.

The role of the many platforms beyond, but including, Facebook and YouTube, that young people tap for their daily news of whatever world is their focus has been highlighted by the explosion in gay and transgender cases. School clusters of "coming out" are of such frequency that the phenomenon has been termed the "contagion" effect, where opinion leaders excite young people over a bold but fashionable idea. 

Dreher has given as an example of this the homeschooled daughter in a Christian family who was allowed to spend a little of her free time at the home of a friend whom the parents regarded as "safe" because the parents were of a high regard. Soon after, it became obvious there was a different reality behind the friend's four walls when the daughter came home and declared to her parents that she had never been happy as a girl - despite her parents' knowledge of how false this was - and wanted to become male. Her argument was full of internet gender talk. The link to the source of  her sudden dis-ease was the other girl's use of a smartphone.

The Digital Revolution has been rightly named. It has produced one of the most comprehensive transformations of society, both in depth and in extent, that humans have had to contend with. It's in its  early days yet, but the impact has been felt at home, at work, and in the manner in which businesses and governments connect with members of the public.

Andrew Willard Jones is an academic who has written The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics. He describes the titans of the digital age as "exaggerated kings of the ancient variety, sons of gods":

They create the world, order it, and, according to their own interests, manipulate the fate of those who inhabit it. 

In the Digital Revolution man is building a virtual world, a world where he is the sole creator. In this world, things do not have natures through which they participate in the ideas of God but are rather, merely, the ideas of men. It is a perfectly nominalist world in which man holds the potentia absoluta: the absolute power of God. 

Within the confines of the virtual, the helpless individual—who “owns” next to nothing—is facing alone the creators of the world’s very structure, those who manage what is true and false, just and unjust, right and wrong, good and evil, and who control its rewards and punishments. The builders of the virtual world need not violently conquer the physical, truth-bearing world of real relations. They need only shift social life into their domain—and allow reality to either assimilate into the structures of their control or simply fall out of view, simply be pushed outside the new world. Unlike the ideological totalitarians, they need not physically destroy rival centers of human solidarity—networks of friends, for example. They need only shift friendship onto their “platforms,” where it becomes an extension of their power rather than a mitigation of it.

They need not attack the family directly, removing children from the care of their parents, as did the totalitarians; they need only let parental authority decay in disuse as both children and parents increasingly live in the world of the screen. And this is indeed the path that the postmodern order seems to be taking.

It is the most formidable strategy for victory that the City of Man has yet devised. It is a strategy of making mankind anxious and uncomfortable in the real, natural world—the world of human-to-human and human-to-nature contact, where bottom-up power can emerge and be maintained—and of making us desire instead the stability, the seamless order, the safety, of the virtual world: the “peace” of slavery.  

Here, then, the final eclipse of the modern political architecture is occurring. The days of the dominance of the nation state—of ultimate power being the direct, political ability to marshal the physical and human resources of large geographical areas—are passing. Increasingly, these physical things are read through and ordered by virtual things that transcend them and connect them in new power structures: structures that stand above the persisting, but now demoted, political and economic forms.

The old forms are not simply annihilated. That is not how history works. Armies, factories, farms, churches, courts— all continue. They are just re-ordered as pieces of something new, as they have been time and again through history. The deconstruction of old social architectures is the simultaneous construction of new social architectures: the inhabitants of old cities slowly disassemble the structures of their past to gain materials with which to build the structures of their future. This is a subtle process that mostly goes unnoticed unless it finally explodes in violence.  

It is quite clear that the various dimensions of social life are no longer under the umbrella of order provided by old-fashioned national “politics.” Indeed, who could be so foolish as to mistake our politicians for the ones actually “in charge” of our social, political, or economic world? The rulers of the virtual world cut across all these old lines; and their rule is potentially more complete, more seamless, and more profound than anything the twentieth-century totalitarians could manage with their propaganda, bureaucracies, and armies. It remains to be seen whether this postmodern transition can be accomplished without the type of blood-letting that has accompanied similar changes throughout history. 

This "subtle process" of constructing new social structures confounds even members of the social and professional elite. New York Times journalist Shira Ovide, who writes the On Tech newsletter - "a guide to how technology is reshaping our lives and world" - stated on July 29:

My colleagues and I have written a lot about the unreal sales, profits and oomph of America’s five technology titans — Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook. [...]

I know that lots of odd things are happening in the U.S. economy right now. But I cannot adequately explain how not normal these numbers are from the tech superpowers. Maybe that’s why Bezos wanted to touch outer space; the Big 5 tech giants have outgrown Earth.

What’s clear more than ever is that America’s tech titans have formed a separate universe in which they are the sun, and everyone else — billions of humans, other companies, entire countries and governments — are mere planets that revolve around them.

Perhaps even more surprising than the size and scale of these companies is how they have mostly grown more profitable in what could or should have been economic conditions that hurt their profits.

I have been befuddled that Amazon and Apple have shown higher profit margins than those companies have had for years — possibly ever. That has happened even though the pandemic has forced those companies to reorganize factories or warehouses, deal with disrupted global shipping, scramble for parts in short supply and spend a fortune to keep their workers safe. [...]

What does all this mean? Well, for one thing, members of Congress or state attorneys general might look at the numbers and ask: If, as the Big Tech companies say, they face stiff competition and could die at any moment, how could profit margins keep going up like this?

Logic would suggest that if the companies are fighting off lots of rivals, they might have to cut prices and profit margins would shrink. So how does Facebook turn each dollar of revenue, nearly all from ads it sells, into 43 cents of profit — a level that most companies can only dream of, and higher than Facebook posted before the pandemic?

I’ve asked over and over in this newsletter whether America’s Big 5 tech titans are invincible. As the gap keeps widening between the super rich tech superstars and the merely super, I’m starting to believe that the answer is yes.

That invincibility is worrying for sure! At the heart of the concern is that the "oomph" these companies wield extends beyond the business sphere right into the home. Right into your home!  They are banning books, curtailing information, and proposing Instagram for Kids. Therefore, it's imperative for everyone to block the reach of the tech titans by reducing screen time, and rejoicing in personal (physical) rather than virtual contact, which will help to defeat the fragmentation that Dreher refers to. 

We need to take control of how we conduct our lives and not become slaves to algorithm-driven platforms that serve foremost the demands of the tech titans. This is a work of mercy that protects the young and prevents the outbreak of violence that Andrew Willard Jones foresees, given the lessons of history. Lastly, with more time to pray, we can learn to enjoy life abundantly.  

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