The Dark Side of Frictionless Technology

What we lose when we surrender so much of our time and attention to generic technology is not just the opportunity for personal experience, but the chance to create from it our own sense of the world, our place in it and what the future for both might be. The more time we spend visiting places that others have described, the more we follow the path

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While we may begin using tools for our collective benefit, we slowly remake our world around the needs of technology, such as building highways and suburbs to support the automobile, or changing school curriculums so that they work on computers. Once we’ve done that for long enough, we eventually find ourselves inside something like a machine—a sel

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McLuhan argued that, pushed to its limits, a medium flips or reverses its characteristics. Internet scale pushes information into disinformation, connection into loneliness, and desire into apathy.

His questions can be asked about all technologies and media. What happens to us when we become infatuated with and then seduced by them? Do they free us or imprison us? Do they improve or degrade democracy? Do they make our leaders more accountable or less so? Our system more transparent or less so? Do they make us better citizens or better consume

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The tradeoffs of making the world more efficient are too light to be felt until they’re too heavy to be broken.