Capital and the disbanding of the traditional family
You would think that as populations grew, it got harder to avoid others. Your town grew, the neighboring town grew, and you eventually ran into conflict. Sure, the earth is big, you could move, but it would be harder to survive. Throw in some social factors, ego, and you’ve got yourself a war.
But for now, technology pulls us apart. It mediates our interactions. You want food? There’s an app for it. A generation ago, you could get food by going to the grocery store, and the farmers were mediated. Before then, you had to be the farmer, but you used tools, which mediated your interaction between the food and your hands. And back in the garden of Eden, you simply pick the fruits off the tree and eat them. If you zoom out, the entirety of the human progress has led us to this point.
In Karl Popper’s view, abstraction is a good thing. A fully abstracted society is the goal. As a programmer, I also see this. Every few years, the abstractions get deeper. The common stuff crystalizes and simplifies into straightforward lego-building. You can be more ambitious for less effort. You plug in one complex widget with a simple veneer into another and you’ve got yourself a product you can sell. Individuals can build what used to require legions. These days, I don’t need to have a clue about registers, or manual memory allocation; and you don’t need to know the first thing about farming.
Abstraction is fine and good until your family and friends, and coworkers, and lovers are intermediated with technology. And this creates a major vulnerability for anyone aiming to abuse the trust you have at every layer of abstraction. And even without that, we can work against our own interests. You don’t talk to your parents directly. Instead, you use a phone. You don’t even need parents for advice. You can get advice online. Are you suffering? You don’t need friends and family who get you; you need a therapist—preferably from Better Help, from the comfort of your home. Do you want to laugh? Again, you don’t need friends. You can watch a video.
The same thing that is happening with food is happening with with our relationships. It won’t stop there. Soon, an LLM will know you better than anyone in your life. There’s a decent chance Apple and Google know more about you than even your lover. Sometimes you get stuck in your head and need an outside perspective from someone (or something) that knows and understands you, but isn’t you. If you can be predicted, you can be understood, and the job of an LLM is to receive a sequence of information and to spit out a prediction on how the sequence will unfold. Maybe the best advice you’ve ever had will one day come from a machine.
People also like people who are somewhat predictable. We don’t want to wake up one day next to someone and not know who they are, or how they got that way. When it comes to machines, if you want to stay ahead of the algorithms, you aim to be maximally unpredictable. In The Underground Man, Dostoyevsky’s main character had this insight. No matter how much our machines can calculate and predict our every move, we will do everything just to be able to say that we are men, and not mere piano keys.
It’s not jus that machines are chasing your interests. You’re aware of this, and you naturally run toward illegibility. And, of course, you slowly lose interest in what it gives you.
One way to escape the algorithmic snare is to raise your kids on it. Put the snake right there so your toddler learns to grapple with it, and hopefully overcomes it. The risk is that you child isn’t ready, and the content consumes them. On top of that, you will be judged by the sensible parents who would never allow such a thing. But you also don’t want to be overprotective.
But it’s clear where the trend is going. When millennials like me got access to the internet, hardly anything was filtered. Sure, I used the computer in the family room where everyone could see. But books? I could read almost any books, and then any books I wanted.
But we live in such an abstract world that you date not by both going to the same bar and being in the same place at the same time, but being on the same app around the same time. And as message frequency accelerates, you increasingly make time for each other, and then you meet. More and more people are meeting online. But in the same way that a grocery store gives you the illusion of choice, so do these apps. At the end of the day, you’ve got a budget, and you’ve got to pick. And the apps don’t want you to pick. They want you coming back. And everyone knows this. If a grocery store sold a pill to satiate you forever, would you return? But we also want what we cannot have, and what we cannot have are supernormal stimuli, and an excess of novelty. You could restrain yourself or you could dose yourself with enough novelty that your dopamine receptors are no longer impressed by anything you see.
What every company wants from you is for you to return and buy again. They’ve got reams of people who’s entire job is to figure out how to make you tick, what you like, dislike, and to package something up for X dollars so you can buy it. Companies are decoding machines for your desires. If you were satisfied, you’d stop buying, and their business would suffer. But if we turn to thing we can buy to make us happy, we slowly chip away at our own humanity. We have everything, and we are depressed. And we should be, it’s only natural.
Leftists of various kinds think that the traditional family is outdated. To them, it’s patriarchal, coercive, etc. But we don’t need ideology to alienate us from each other. Technology will do that on its own. Our own desires will do it.