What is Technopoptimism? Take Two

Or, Why I Stopped Writing, the Conclusion

A world where dogs could invent more than one technology.

I love my dog, and he’s a good boy. But often he’s not. And even though I have no reason to believe dogs think like this, I hope he feels lucky that he has spent his life with someone who takes care of him and feeds him and lets him have pizza. But the flip side is, when he’s being punished, would he worry that I’m going to stop doing that? In which case, he’s back on his own. And as a dog, he only has two options. The first is to find his way into the wild and hunt, like his ancestors did. Perhaps he can find a pack. The second is to use the great technology dogs developed: convince another human to feed him.

Dogs only have one technological achievement, but it’s a big one. Some entrepreneurial gigachad of a wolf realized that if he hung around, humans would do his most important job for him. All those other animals are locked in constant battles to find enough food to survive. But dogs - and a handful of other species – hacked the human mind and got us to do their work for them. This little jerk doesn’t need to ever get out there and follow scents and track an animal and catch it. All he needs to do is wake up and I give him food. In some ways, it’s more impressive than any technology humans have developed. But, because it’s also their only one, it’s the only thing that stands between them and the harsh reality of nature.

The criminal, once caught, attempts to feign innocence.

Frankly, I think the topic of why I stopped writing is uninteresting enough that it does not merit its own article, even if I did owe an explanation. But when I realized I could do that by exploring two of the biggest ideas I have about the modern internet, I jumped on it. Yet, I realized if I ended there, I would be ignoring the most important part.

Or, at least, the kayfabe most important part. The real most important part is that I launched this newsletter when employed, and carrying it on as a solo attorney was quite difficult due to time constraints and the need to make money. Perhaps someday I will launch a premium membership, but I feel guilty doing that without giving you more content. But you can smash that button below if you support that idea.

Instead, I tried to use AI to help me become more efficient as I wrote these. I ran my most popular articles through ChatGPT and asked it to give me a summation of my newsletter. It told me that I wrote a newsletter about the dangers and flaws of technology.

Pardon?

Unsurprisingly, since I only fed it my popular ones. Which is the inherent flaw of this project. What is this newsletter even about? I tried to write that once and it was the piece I most hate. So let’s step back and talk about some things I believe.

First, I believe technology is not just good, it’s critical to human survival and, equally as important, flourishing. There’s an old marketing slogan for the Colt Revolver that sums up technology well: God made men, Colt made them equal. Technology is the thing we do when we use our brains to make the world more advantageous for us. Being anti-technology is being anti-human. It’s why the people who complain about technology never poop outdoors.

I’m not one for tribalism, but because I am human, I am pro-human. Not to the exclusion of other living things, but in that I want to see us do well. And our entire experience – I almost said history but that’s a technology – has been that we create technologies that allow us to do better.

Of course, that has a flip side. Without delving into religion, all things can be both good and bad and usually are. The very sun that nurtures us and gives us life will someday end all life on Earth in fire. Technology is no different. Other than those damned scooters, our individual technological advances are both good and bad. The internet as Exhibit A. But also look at Mr. Colt’s revolver or, more broadly, firearms. It’s good that we created weaponry that meant the large and powerful man could no longer bully the small and weak man. But also, World War One.

(I write these with specific breaks for graphics and videos and I originally had actual WWI footage here but it was so brutal I changed my mind and just went with movie footage, WWI was really bad!)

As such, if you think technology – aka human progress – is good then you must also acknowledge that it should be used for good. Which means criticizing the bad use of technology – i.e., destroying our urban areas with those damned scooters – or the negative uses of an otherwise positive technology – i.e., the effect the internet has on our brains.

Yet, that is only a description of techno-optimism. The pop part of it comes from my steadfast belief that technological development must be human focused. The digital revolution has increasingly led to a cloisterization of technology.¹ As technological progress gets moved more and more towards a specialized elite, it has two problems. The first is that progress slows. The best example of this being how the Industrial Revolution was largely powered by numerous small technological leaps, usually from amateurs. As we disempower the population at large from making progress, we should naturally expect less progress.²

The second is that as we move further from a popularized technology, the more we see a disconnect between what is created and what is needed. Consider the rise of artificial intelligence, which is all tech people can talk about but its actual usage among the public at large is highly limited.³

To synthesize, this newsletter is about the relationship between technology and society. Sometimes those relationships are positive, sometimes they are negative, and both should be discussed.

Now, here’s the thing: this is a terrible idea. It’s inherently self-defeating and risks massive audience confusion. Because one week I’m writing about how awful QR code menus are and then I’m turning around and extolling the virtues of AI art. The people who like the former are rarely going to like the latter, and vice versa. This is a recipe for unpopularity.

And what happened is that my negative pieces almost uniformly performed better than my positive ones. Although my positive ones usually seemed to get more engagement⁴ mainly in the form of people telling me I’m wrong. Which caused a crisis of “what the hell am I even doing here?”

Audience capture is a real thing but that’s usually an economic incentive. I have no economic incentive. I’ve made no money off this thing. I have freedom. Even if only a dozen people read this thing, I’d rather them read what I feel passionately about. And I passionately believe we need more optimism about what we as humans can do.

My single favorite paragraph I ever wrote here is the below:

In 1941 the Wehrmacht captured the village of Klushino on their way to Moscow. The village was destroyed. The residents had everything seized and were forced to work the land. The schoolhouse where a young seven-year-old boy named Yuri attended was burned down, along with most of the other structures. He was forced to live in a mud shack and watched his younger brother survive a hanging by a Nazi officer. His older brothers were sent to Poland as slave labor and he thought they were dead. Eventually he ended up in a hospital. The scale of horror that boy lived through is unimaginable to any of us 21st Century Americans. Surely, he could be forgiven for losing faith in mankind’s ability to do great things. And yet, less than 20 years after the Nazis came to his village, he became the first human being to ever slip the surly bonds of gravity and touch the face of God. Yes, we often do horrible things, but it should never disabuse us of our faith that we can do great things.

Why did I use the word village in back-to-back sentences? I regret that. But the rest I stand strongly behind. And the importance of this can be seen below:

We are increasingly becoming more pessimistic about the future. When I was still spending far too much time on social media, the discourse in tech was about whether AI was going to doom us all. Even tech people are becoming techno-pessimists.

I stand up and say no. I think we can do a lot of good. I think we can use AI to help ameliorate loneliness. I don’t think social media is causing kids to be depressed. I think we can bioengineer not just this planet but other ones too.

I also think we need to be careful that we are doing good, and that’s on everyone’s shoulders, not just the people creating technologies. I think you consume too much news. I think you should become more comfortable with change. I think you should start showing more skepticism about what you read.

And I also think the people developing and harnessing technology can do better. I think CGI is making movies worse. I think trying to unnaturally extend our lives is a civilization destroying idea. I think we need to stop trying to decrease human interaction. And I think we need to destroy those damned scooters.⁵

To those of you who were with me before the break, thank you and I apologize. To this day I still open every email that says I have a new subscriber and audibly say “Thank you [your name, username, or email]” because it does mean a lot to me. And I do hope to expand my content here, particularly if I create a paid tier (and I’m open to ideas!). But I also need to stay committed to what I believe which is explicitly optimistic. I think human progress is great and I think it comes through technology. And although it sometimes needs criticizing, I think it’s pretty darned good.

Although next week’s article is so controversial most of y’all are going to unsubscribe anyway. But we’ll wait until next week for that.

1. I’ve been trying to write about this for almost three years and I still don’t have a definitive statement on this so please allow this brief summation to do.

2. Again, this is an unbelievably complex idea that I have struggled with for years so this is a second footnote to emphasize how glib this version of it is. But I have an excellent article on the importance of amateurs lined up to publish in a few months.

3. Don’t fret AIniacs, the next two weeks are devoted to AI and are largely positive.

4. Almost everything on this newsletter is very low engagement, which leads me to believe that a lot of people briefly skim this and move on. But just remember to smash that like button and we’re cool.

5. All of those are articles I have lined up, so think of this as a teaser. Except the scooter thing, that’s simply my creed.