Technology, Power & the Myth of Progress

Are we accelerating towards rebirth or cataclysmic destruction?

The dominant story says technology is a neutral tool, that more of it means progress, and that history is a rocket ship taking us to infinity and beyond. Each of those three claims is wrong, and the errors compound into a civilisation that mistakes acceleration for direction and hands its future to whoever builds the fastest. Untangling them requires more care than either the techno-optimist’s cheerleading or the doomer’s despair, because it’s not about whether a technology is good or bad, but who it gives power to, and what kind of life it requires of the people who adopt it and who are affected by it.

I. Technology Is Not Neutral

The belief that a technology is just a tool, neutral in itself, good or bad only according to how it is used. A gun, a smartphone, a nuclear reactor: on this view, each is inert until a human picks it up, so the only question worth asking is about the user’s intentions. This is comforting and irritatingly false.

The philosopher Langdon Winner helps to explain why. Technologies have politics that they embody, encourage, and sometimes require particular arrangements of power, independent of anyone’s intentions. Winner distinguished two ways this happens. Some technologies are designed, deliberately or not, to settle a political question, the classic example being infrastructure built to physically exclude certain groups. More profoundly, some technologies are strongly compatible with particular political arrangements and incompatible with others, so that adopting them is to lean toward a form of social and political life, whatever anyone intends. We are seeing this with the current AI race to the bottom. The belief is that, unless you take advantage of the newest AI features, you’ll be left behind, and by using them, you may stand to gain a fortune before we are all inevitably left redundant. 

Lewis Mumford, decades earlier, mentioned that two kinds of technology have run side by side throughout history: the authoritarian and the democratic. Authoritarian technics are system-centred, large-scale, and centralising, immensely powerful and immensely productive, but inherently unstable and dependent on concentrating control in a few hands. Democratic technics are human-scale, distributed, and resourceful, weaker in raw power but durable, adaptable, and compatible with autonomy. The same human need can often be met by either. A society can meet its energy demand through a nuclear plant, which is centralising almost by physical necessity (enormous capital, tight security, a managerial priesthood, a grid radiating from a few points), or through distributed solar, which is far easier to arrange so that power, electrical and political, stays dispersed among many hands. Neither is neutral. Each tilts the social order, and the tilt is built into the technology before anyone decides how to use it.

Technology does not simply dictate society from the outside; the social and economic system it is embedded in shapes how it develops, and the same artifact can sometimes be arranged for very different effects. Technology and power co-produce each other. But the neutral-tool story erases this, and erasing it is how a civilisation sleepwalks into adopting technologies that reshape it blindly, while telling itself it is merely picking up convenient instruments. The question is never just “how will we use this?” It is also “what does this require of us, and where does it move power?” When confronted with something that seems too good to be true, always come back to the old saying, “There are no free lunches.” 

II. Where the Tools Are Moving Power 

The internet is the greatest irony. It arrived promising disintermediation and liberation: a flat, open network that would route around gatekeepers, distribute voice, and hand power to the edges. For a moment, it did. Then it consolidated, with startling speed, into one of the most centralised information architectures ever built, a handful of platforms mediating most of human attention, communication, and commerce. The democratic technic curdled into an authoritarian one, which watches and listens to our every move.

Shoshana Zuboff named it surveillance capitalism. Its logic: human experience is claimed as free raw material, harvested as behavioural data, refined into predictions about what people will do, and sold in markets for future behaviour, with the most valuable predictions being those that come from shaping behaviour rather than forecasting it. Why predict behaviour when you can trigger it? This produces what Zuboff calls instrumentarian power, the power to know and tune human behaviour toward someone else’s ends, exercised not through the jackboot and the threat of the old totalitarianism but through a ubiquitous, friendly, frictionless digital architecture that nudges, recommends, and conditions at scale. The much-discussed harms attributed loosely to “the internet”, the erosion of attention and privacy, the addiction, the misinformation, the digital tribalism, are not accidents of the medium. They are the predictable output of an economic engine that profits by capturing attention and modifying behaviour, the same attention-harvesting incentive the Medical & Pharmaceutical Industries page traced through other markets, here operating on the human nervous system directly. The algorithmic amplification of outrage and tribal division follows from the same logic: what holds attention sells, and little holds attention like fear and tribal threat, so the machine learns to feed the fear and hypervigilance that the section overview identified as collective dysregulation. The perfect propaganda machine that cannot be defeated from the inside. 

Artificial intelligence, as of this writing, intensifies the same dynamic rather than reversing it. Whatever its genuine capabilities and benefits, its present trajectory concentrates power further: the computational resources, data, and capital required to build frontier systems sit with a handful of corporations, producing what one critic called the greatest concentration of computational and economic power in history, controlled by a few firms answerable to almost no one. A useful discipline accompanies this: much public debate is steered toward speculative far-future scenarios of superintelligence while the concrete, present concentration of power proceeds with little scrutiny, which is itself convenient for those doing the concentrating. 

None of this means the technologies are irredeemable, and the final section returns to their democratic potential. It means the dominant arrangement of them is centralising, extractive, and dysregulating, and that this follows from incentives and design, not from misuse by bad actors who could simply be swapped out.

III. Acceleration Is Not Direction

Set aside power for a moment and examine the other half of the progress myth: the assumption that faster and more means better. Here, the sociologist Hartmut Rosa supplies his analysis of social acceleration, which he breaks into three coupled engines. Technological acceleration, the speeding-up of transport, communication, and production. The acceleration of social change, with institutions, knowledge, careers, and relationships churning faster, the ground shifting under people within a single lifetime rather than across generations. And the acceleration of the pace of life, the subjective experience of having less time, of perpetual hurry, which is the paradox at the centre: the technologies that promised to save time have produced a civilisation that feels it has none.

The mechanism behind the paradox shows acceleration feeding itself. Each efficiency gain raises the baseline expectation and frees capacity that is immediately filled with more, so the time saved is never banked, only reinvested in additional activity. This has an economic cousin worth naming, the Jevons paradox: when a resource is used more efficiently, total consumption of it tends to rise rather than fall, because efficiency lowers the cost and invites more use. Efficiency, counter-intuitively, accelerates throughput rather than reducing it. A civilisation optimising relentlessly for efficiency is not heading toward rest and sufficiency; it is heading toward more, faster, indefinitely.

Rosa’s diagnosis of the result is alienation: the condition of being unable to live as one wishes even while nominally free to choose, because keeping pace with the acceleration crowds out the slow, unhurried relationship to people, work, and world that a meaningful life requires. The acceleration is so pervasive that he characterises it as a quasi-totalitarian force, one that compels without an identifiable compeller, and that no individual chooses yet all are subject to. The metabolic, mental, and social dysfunctions traced throughout are, in significant part, the symptoms of organisms built for one tempo forced to run at another, the allostatic overload of a whole civilisation changing faster than its nervous systems can metabolise.

A society moving faster is not necessarily going anywhere good. Speed is not direction, motion is not progress, and a civilisation that has confused the two has lost the ability to ask where it is actually headed, because it is moving too fast to look.

IV. The Myth of Progress

The myth of progress is the belief that history runs on an automatic upward escalator, that newer is better, that technological and economic growth equal human improvement, and that whatever problems arise, more progress will solve them.

Improvement is happening and must not be sneered at: in medicine, in the reduction of certain forms of violence and absolute poverty, in literacy and child mortality, the gains are measurable, and pretending otherwise is its own problem, and progress is neither automatic, uniform, nor free, and treating it as a law of nature produces three specific blindnesses.

It hides the costs: The same century that cut child mortality also produced industrialised warfare, ecological destruction, and the surveillance and acceleration described above. A progress narrative that records only the credits is an accounting fraud.

It assumes a direction that is unsustainable and driven by greed: The escalator can run backwards. Ronald Wright’s idea of the progress trap captures the danger: a technology or strategy that solves an immediate problem so successfully that it creates a larger one it cannot solve, the way perfecting the hunting of large game fed growing populations until the game was gone. A society can innovate its way into a corner, and the faith that more innovation must rescue it is precisely the belief that springs the trap.

It conflates the kinds of progress: Material and technological advances do not automatically convert into wellbeing, wisdom, or human flourishing. Beyond a threshold, rising income and consumption stop tracking happiness and meaning, the metabolic and mental-health data move the wrong way amid material abundance, and the Connection and meaning that strongly determine wellbeing have eroded while the dials of “progress” have climbed. A culture can grow richer, faster, and more powerful while its people grow lonelier, sicker, and more anxious, which is not a paradox but the predictable result of measuring the wrong thing and calling it the only thing. 

Civilisations rise and fall, progress in one domain buys regress in another, and the trajectory is steered, or not, by choices rather than carried by an escalator. Removing the myth restores agency and a need to take action to prevent watching these inevitabilities passively.

V. Tools for Collapse or Creation

The answer is not to reject technology, which is neither possible nor desirable, but to choose and shape it by Mumford’s distinction. The same tools can serve collapse or creation depending on whether they centralise or distribute, dysregulate or regulate, addict or serve.

An adaptive tool extends human capability while leaving the user more autonomous, more capable, and more connected to the world, and it responds to the person using it. An addictive toy captures the user, optimises for engagement over wellbeing, and answers to whoever profits from that capture. A bicycle, an open encyclopedia, and a piece of open-source software you control are adaptive. An algorithmic feed engineered to maximise time-on-device is addictive. The same device can host both, which is why the discipline is to ask of any technology not whether it is sophisticated but whether it serves the user or captures them.

At the collective scale, the corresponding choice is between centralising and decentralising technology. The democratic technics Mumford pointed to have living modern forms: open-source software, which distributes capability and keeps it auditable and beyond any single owner; mesh networks and federated, decentralised platforms, which route around chokepoints and keep communication resilient; distributed renewable energy, which disperses the literal and political power that centralised generation concentrates; tools for privacy and encryption, which return control of the behavioural data that surveillance capitalism extracts; local and open manufacturing, which rebuilds the place-based capability the Rebuilding Culture & Community page described. Decentralisation is not magic and can easily be co-opted. Much that was marketed as liberating decentralisation, including large parts of the cryptocurrency world, reproduced concentration and extraction under new branding, or built fresh speculative casinos, and a technology should be judged by where power actually ends up, not by the manifesto attached to it. 

Resilient, regenerative order is distributed, adaptive, and human-centred, while fragile, extractive order is centralised, optimising, and system-centred. The choice of technology is a choice of which kind of order to build, and it is made not once by society but continually, by the builders who design tools and the users who adopt them. 

VI. Technology & Society

• Technology is not neutral: Tools embody power. Some are strongly compatible with centralised, authoritarian arrangements; others with distributed, democratic ones. The same need (energy, communication) can be met by either, and the choice tilts the social order before anyone decides how to “use” it.
• Ask who it gives power to: The decisive question about any technology is not “is it good or bad?” but “where does it move power, and what does it require of the people who adopt it?”
• The dominant digital technologies centralise: Surveillance capitalism extracts behaviour, sells predictions, and shapes conduct (instrumentarian power); the attention economy profits by capturing attention and amplifying tribal outrage; frontier AI, so far, concentrates power sharply upward. The harms are the engine running as designed.
• Acceleration is not direction: Technological, social, and life-pace acceleration produce a civilisation that feels it has no time despite time-saving tools (and efficiency raises consumption rather than lowering it, the Jevons paradox). Speed is not progress, and a society moving too fast cannot ask where it is going.
• Progress is real but not automatic: Genuine gains (medicine, reduced violence and poverty) coexist with hidden costs, the risk of progress traps, and a measurable disconnect between material growth and wellbeing. 
• Adaptive tools vs addictive toys: An adaptive tool leaves you more autonomous and answers to you; an addictive toy captures you and answers to whoever profits. Judge the tool by whether it serves or captures.
• Decentralised vs centralised: Open-source, mesh and federated networks, distributed energy, encryption, and local manufacturing distribute power; judge them by where power actually lands, not by their marketing, since “decentralisation” is easily co-opted (much of crypto concentrated power under liberating branding).
• The choice is continuous and bottom-up: Resilient order is distributed, adaptive, human-centred; fragile order is centralised, optimising, system-centred. Which gets built is decided continually by builders and users.

VII. Now What?

Technology is the force the modern world most readily mistakes for progress itself, and the mistake has three parts. Tools are not neutral; they carry politics, tilting toward concentrated or distributed power before anyone chooses how to use them, and the dominant technologies of the moment, surveillance platforms, the attention economy, frontier AI, lean toward concentration, extraction, and the dysregulation of the human nervous system, by design and incentive rather than by accident. A civilisation can move faster and faster while losing the capacity to ask where it is headed, and ours largely has, and progress is not automatic. The gains are real and must be kept in view, alongside the hidden costs, the progress traps, and the measurable gap between growing richer and living better. Removing the myth restores the steering the escalator-story denied. The same tools can serve collapse or creation, and the line between them is the line the whole section has drawn: centralised, extractive, system-centred technology builds fragile order, while distributed, adaptive, human-centred technology builds resilient order. Choosing the second, continually, as builders and as users, is how the bottom-up renewal of Part V reaches the machines, and how a civilisation stops spinning faster and starts choosing a direction.

VIII. Cross-Links

• The Death/Rebirth of Society for the section overview
• Collapse & Complexity for centralisation, fragility, and the cost of complexity
• Utopia, Dystopia, and the False Binary for techno-utopianism and the rejection of grand design
• Rebuilding Culture & Community for the local, distributed building this page points toward