18.5.26
Dear Partners in Thought,
As it is not healthy to write all the time about Trump and his world destruction , including our old and once essential America (I hope many will see that my pieces in 2025 were sadly right), I thought I should focus on a very clear and additional, if not worse, societal development engineered by Big Tech and many of its leaders.
When I walk or take a tram in my beautiful Prague, it is hard not to see the legions of people, men and women, often young but also older, watching their phones or carrying them while walking or just being outside. While some are rightfuly looking for needed information, many have fallen easy prey to what has become a tech-engineered addiction close to a deep disease over recent years. Youngsters stay in their rooms while watching never ending video games, initially making their parents happy as they seem contentedly busy. There are so many examples of the human mind being highjacked by internet tools which initially were seen as a sign of a great human progress. Many adults are now following gifted podcasters that flood them with what they really want to hear socially and politically while making huge financial returns. The screens have won the allegiance of too many as they are easier to handle (if never manage) and only require a basic watching and listening ability. While isolation and lack of human communication is now the rising impact globally, the key problem is that today very few people are thinking any more, by which I mean in an old fashioned manner. And AI is not helping, while simultaneously worsening poor human habits and not empowering future careers in a soon-to-be job-reduced market that some investors will initially find fine – to a short point. At least most schools have now abandonned graded homework for obvious reasons.
It is clear that many tech addicts, as they grow older, know the problem; but addictions are not easy to manage. There have been healthy reactions recently from country leaderships like in Australia or France to limit the use of some damaging social media by youngsters below the age of 16 or even 15. Other countries like Turkey, Greece or Indonesia have already enacted similar laws while Spain, Austria, Poland, Slovenia, the UK and Malaysia are either about to pass such laws or are considering doing so – thus following Canberra’s lead (while Italy and Germany are introducing parental consent legislations). Schools in Sweden will ban phones, as in many European countries, and – key – will reduce digital learning and reintroduce books in the classroom so students can read (and indeed think). It is good that some countries react, even if similar examples like in the US are naturally not forthcoming (but for a few states that find it challenging, as dealing with the easy historical free speech mantra) given the lobbying weight of Big Tech except for the odd school like one in Florida that was able to see quick positive outcomes of their more controlled acedemic approach.
There may be some deeper rationale (if the word could ever apply) behind this adverse digital societal revolution. Accessing a large number of individuals, young and older, via the new tools provided by the internet (all the more since 2000) is a way to control the minds, also with a political dimension at play. Many in Silicon Valley and especially the Big Tech so-called Bros (names we all know) have been, initially surprisingly, supporting hard right leaders not to say populists or autocrats in the making in America but also in Europe. Being close to and promoting the US president is a useful way to ensure fewer regulations and strong support in dealing with what they perceive as a bureaucratic and financially costly EU. Some populist leaders may not yet see that Big Tech leaders could not care less about any policies or ideological flavour but want to promote their interests first, this seeing the anger-fuelled populist rise as a tactical means to a strategic end. It would not be inconceivable that the main goal of Big Tech would be to eventually rule the world and change democracy as we knew it in the West before the Trump era. It is also clear that such a development is not safe for Big Tech leaders as some have found recently when their main home was attacked or when they do not go out with less than 20 bodyguards, which is also not surprising in the Charlton Heston NRA and weekly mass shooting-friendly and indeed changing America.
It is always good to review where we are and notice serious societal slippages, even if it is easy to get used to them and do nothing – as we see with the current political era in the US (reassuring no Kings marches put aside). If nothing is done to stop this Big Tech-led societal decline (even if money is the key short-term goal), the roots of a revolutionary backlash of a French 1789 kind, this time of a strong anti-capitalist flavour, might be coming at some point. This scenario might also be enhanced by the expected governing incompetence of electorally-savvy and social media/Big Tech-assisted populists after gaining power at the booth, the latter being their main strength in our days. Hence the need to stress what matters very clearly and trying to go back to the relatively sane world we knew only a few years ago.
Having said all this, it should be always stressed that technological advancement is and should be good as long as it benefits society. One should not be against “industrial revolutions” as long as they bring human advancement, which is indeed a clear problem today. Big Tech leaders are also not all bad and only mega-billion-focused as shown with the founder of Anthropic and his recent controlled approach to his tools being indiscriminately used by the highly differentiated US Department of “War” under Trump 2.0. There is still hope in the making but we should ensure passivity does not win the day as we see too often in our societies today.
Warmest regards,
Serge
Desperate Measures 