The Tech Elite's Frictionless Fantasy

The digital world promises a frictionless existence of infinite growth, convenience, and scale. But what happens when that virtual map starts consuming the real territory?

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

YouTube Version here

I just got confirmed as a Permanent Member of the Club of Rome. I’ve always felt too young and countercultural to be on something like that, but hey - I’m not that young anymore, and the counterculture really is just any culture at this point. All culture, all human interaction, is counter to the forces of capitalism, profit, extraction, and domination characterizing our society at the moment.

Club of Rome always sounded to me like some United Nations Eurozone Bilderberg Group for good. What they really are is a loosely networked group of scientists, former statesmen, economists, and thinkers like me, who together seek to tackle complex global challenges through a systems-thinking lens. They got famous back in 1972 for a report they put out called The Limits to Growth, which warned of a societal and environmental collapse if unchecked growth continued. We would soon be consuming the earth’s resources faster than the planet can regenerate them.

They published lots of reports and computer models and stuff over the past fifty years, but — at least last time I checked — haven’t been successful in convincing the world about the planet’s limited resources. I think too many people see them as European nerd-policy-wonks with unrealistic expectations for what any real government or market could tolerate. Limits? Them’s fighting words. The market can expand, exponentially, forever! TINA, as Margaret Thatcher (England’s libertarian Prime Minister) used to say: T I N A: There Is No Alternative.

I think Club of Rome were interested in me because of my background thinking and writing about media and technology. And maybe some of the work we’re doing here at Team Human. As I’ve been writing for years, not only are digital media technologies threatening to consume the planet’s resources, but they form the environment of propaganda in which the current course is made to appear all-but-inevitable.

So, to the first part, we should all know by now that AI and its component technologies consume a ton of planet. We have to mine for rare earth metals (well, we don’t mine ourselves — we send children into mines at gunpoint to get it); we have to dedicate already depleted water tables and dying aquifers to data center cooling; the energy required to run our digital economy, now fueled by artificial intelligence, far exceeds what we need to feed and house even twice our current population.

Moreover, the algorithmically determined new media environment, combined with its growing capacity for surveillance and psychological profiling, has created a total propaganda environment in which alternative perspectives to infinite growth are muted and sidelined. The digital media environment has all-but superseded the real one, with humans looking for validation of their perspectives on screens rather than in their lived experience. Those of us who seek to write books or articles must prove our worth as online influencers before we are entrusted with precious publishing resources or granted attention from our fellow humans.

The growth priority used to be a particular approach to economic development — one among many — argued by the conservative and libertarian economic camps. But it has been reified and amplified by a digital infrastructure premised on growth itself. These are the tools that both enable the financialization of our world — through ultrafast trading, startup venture capital, and the reduction of human activity to commodifiable data — as well as the tools that are used to convince us that this is the only way the world can function.

The wealthiest among us understand this best. Yet because becoming or staying ultra-wealthy is the only way to survive in such a world, they do whatever they can to keep this system in place.

Any resistance to the frictionless expansion of the digital economy is a problem to be eliminated. That’s why when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris began to talk about regulating the unchecked growth of the AI industry, tech leaders suddenly changed their allegiance from Democrats to Trump. He promised to deregulate AI, crypto, media monopolies, and the rest of the technocracy, while also championing the might-makes-right logic of the marketplace.

Thus, Trump as president passes laws and signed directives limiting States’ ability to challenge the construction of new data centers and the hoarding of water resources by technology companies. They’re are not even allowed to know which company is behind which one. Or others demanding AI companies turn over their technologies to the Pentagon.

This first year of such oligarchic rule been a disaster. At least for people. As Trump has called it, this is the “greatest economy in the history of the planet.” He is right, in that corporate profits are at an all-time high along with the Dow Jones stock index. The billionaire class’s wealth has gone up by a trillion dollars since Trump became President. Of course, the share of the American economy going to labor is the lowest it has ever been in history. And I’m not even talking about the billions Trump and his family have managed to pilfer from their manipulation and redirection of public resources, the crypto and oil scams they’ve run, or the direct bribes they have taken from everyone from oil cartels to token exchanges.

In 2013, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, promising to preserve the power of the press in the face of the digital onslaught. In 2017, shortly after Trump took office in what was largely thought to be an election tainted by fake news and propaganda online, he introduced a new motto on the front page: “Democracy dies in darkness.” We knew what side he was on — or at least representing himself to be on.

Now, he is dismantling the paper piece by piece. He’s not simply selling it to someone who could carry out the storied paper’s mission, or even spending what to you or me would be a buck seventy five to fund the publication for a decade. No, he’s making the financially disadvantageous choice of crippling the paper. He’s voluntarily doing to the Washington Post what only happened to CBS after it was purchased by Trump ally and Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, who has his own plans to harvest all of our genetic data for his Stargate Project.

And of course we watched as Elon Musk bought Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg moved his content management team to Austin, and even Apple’s Tim Cook bent the knee with a solid gold statue for Trump. These are digital people with digital agendas. If we accept the logic of the digital landscape divorced from the reality of the ground in which we live, it all makes as much sense as free market capitalism separated from human labor and wellbeing. The abstract landscape of digital symbols is frictionless.

That would be fine if we were video game characters, but we are human beings dependent on the physical world for our vitality. We are not viral media; we are vital organisms.

Twitter is not the real world. Those who live by Twitter, usually get taken down by the platform as well. It is no more psychologically sustainable than the expansionary digital environment is physically sustainable.

Every startup business plan I see these days heralds the “democratization” of their platform. The “sovereignty” of their users. As if democracy, like the market, is enabled and enhanced by a frictionless platform. Everyone, everywhere, voting all the time with their tokens or irises or pre-cog algorithms.

But no, democracy won’t happen online in the universal global sphere. Democracy is not a frictionless, universal phenomenon, but a high-friction, interpersonal, local phenomenon. If you try to do democracy “at scale” like one of Meta’s platforms, or some global blockchain or DAO (decentralized autonomous organization), it ends up subjected to the same power law dynamics that killed the music industry in a digital age: superstars rise to the top, and everyone else sells one copy of one song. Recommendation engines and feedback loops amplify the few, who become gargantuan abstract icons at the top of the pyramid. Monsters.

Something like democracy only works when there are limited number of voices, and institutions to contain them. Just like a physical town has a village square, such institutions and organizations create focal points. People compromise, and struggle through the pain points — the social and ideological friction necessary to learn how to tolerate each other and reach a mutually agreed-upon compromise. Never perfect, but better than nothing. In a frictionless landscape, all you can get is authoritarianism by the owners. This is what Peter Thiel’s whole business and religious philosophy is about: own the platform instead of struggling with the other weaklings on the platform itself. The house wins.

It feels to many of us like this digital frictionless landscape is about to consume what is left of the real world. That we are increasingly living inside the reality depicted by our AIs, and controlled by the titans who have monopolized our markets. They have all the cards.

But I’m here to tell you that the cards are not real. The money is not real. The code is not real. They’re all virtual, frictionless symbols that only seem real the more we surrender our consciousness and attention to the simulation. Even the law is abstract. Sure, our laws do serve us, but not when they’re written by the tech companies, themselves. And not when we fail to recognize they are abstractions - idealized guidelines that require live, human, on-the-ground interpretation to work. Otherwise, they’re just invitations to be gamed, worked around, or overridden with a new layer of abstraction on top. As we’ve seen in America this past year, the law or a statute doesn’t protect anything all by itself. How’s habeas corpus protecting citizens from getting rounded up in the streets? Where is justice for the victims of rape and sex trafficking?

The generic landscape of Twitter is not the real world. We know that. Too many people have to engage with the real world in order to survive. The memetic arms race, making videos of the Obamas as monkeys or making other ones to counteract them, only matters so much. When you can’t afford gas or lunch for your kid or medicine for your mom, the memes become irrelevant. The real world is still bigger than social media.

Yes, it feels like AI is going to swallow us whole, take our jobs and direct the planetary consciousness itself. Yes, AI can scale and leverage seemingly infinitely. The same as anything digital. There may be just one me standing here in this room, but look how many images and videos and copies we can make. Surely the copies and abstractions add up to more than me, right?

Wrong. I say no. Even a billion maps are not as big as the territory. These are descriptions of the territory. Depictions of the territory. That’s why they can scale so infinitely. They’re not made of territory. They’re imaginary.

That’s why the priorities of the abstracted landscapes so often contradict with those of real life. Ever notice how when unemployment gets bad, the stock market goes up? Why? Because it means companies don’t need as many workers to make their stuff. The corporate sphere is becoming less dependent on expensive, unscalable human workers to do its thing. Because of this disconnect, when unemployment goes up the federal reserve lowers interest rates to stimulate corporate growth and more hiring. Interest rates are just the cost of borrowing money. When money gets cheaper, stocks get relatively more expensive. Why hold money if its value is going down. Just borrow some cheap money and buy more stocks.

But that’s just a long way of saying bad things happening in the real world are often really good for the fake world. If people lose their bearings in the real world, that’s great for the GPS companies. If people lose the ability to make eye contact, that’s great for dating apps. If people get cancer, it sucks for them but it’s good for drug stocks. The simulated world, itself, is like a form of cancer, only phantomized. Immaterial. It needs our substance, silicon, lithium, cobalt, energy, and awareness to exist, but it’s not the thing. It needs our money, but money’s not really a thing either. We’re busy working at pointless tasks in order to create one fake thing to pay for another fake thing. All for some sociopathic billionaires — soon trillionaires — to game their escape from reality altogether.

It’s not all bad, either. Don’t get me wrong. The symbolic realm is like a dream space, open to our creativity and imagination. It’s potentially playful, weird, predictive, constructive….we can model almost anything, practice scenarios, engage with interdimensional beings. Every time we get a new medium we gain a new imaginary, a new “elsewhere” to explore new possibilities - or, for those with different intentions, a new elsewhere from which to wage war on the real. It’s like the difference between using AI to surveil and manipulate people or using it to make weird creative explorations while also staying aware of the costs of leveraging that much matter and energy.

I still love these spaces. Look. Here I am!

But we have to remember that the real world is bigger than the virtual one. I still think that there’s more going on in a cubic centimeter of soil than in all the AI processing in the world. Not the real-world machines, which have matter and substance and everything, but the symbolic layer of code and language they manipulate.

The real world has friction, nuance, chaos, and swirl. It’s not part of a large language model’s probabilistic reduction, but the sacred mystery of collision and connection. Not just frictionless cycles of data, but warm messy undulations, respiration, exchange, breath, friction…you know what I’m talking about.

Love is messy. Democracy is messy. Faith is messy. People are messy. But it’s in that messy, chaotic friction where real stuff happens. Stuff that’s infinitely more complex and experiential and even evolutionary than any simulation or singularity. We will not be consumed by the simulation. Our world is bigger. Theirs is inside ours.

What to do? Boycott Amazon. Sorry, but they’re not good. The incremental rewards in convenience are not worth supporting the greater project in the replacement of all commerce by one company. Now that they have shown they’re willing to spend money to shut down democratic conversations and assuage fascists? Time to stop. Stop paying for Prime, and the motivation to use their platform goes away fast. And then you’ll discover all the clever ways that real companies have figured out how to make it cheaper and better for you to buy directly from them.

Engage with religious, spiritual people. All kinds. They are trying to connect to something off the map. Something that can’t be named, or reduced to a symbol. Well, many of them are.

Work against entropy. Use these tools as you must, but in ways determined to be more than worth the energy and resources they are using up. We don’t go back, we go through. But we do it smarter and wiser and aware of what’s fixed, what’s changeable, what’s real, and what’s fiction.

Like the Club of Rome explained in the 1970s, the game we’re playing is taking up more resources than can be regenerated by the real world. It’s a clever game, this growth-based capitalism thing, but it can’t be left running forever. It’s like a computer with what we used to call a “resource leak,” or a faulty piece of code that leads the program to use more and more of the computer’s processing power every time it cycles until it crashes. Growth-based economics worked fine on paper, like the perfect pyramid scheme, as long as there was more room for the market to grow.

It looked like digital networks would provide more room at no cost, but it turns out the costs are high and room is fake. They accelerate extraction of the planet’s resources, and colonize our lived experience - our human time. These frictionless phenomena don’t exist, and neither do the systems of ownership and control that they direct. It’s just another map, written by people who don’t mean us any good. Frictionless sounded great at the time. Infinite unimpeded growth. Total convenience. Nothing uncomfortable or ambiguous.

Well, it’s time for a new game. One we play together, here in the real world. These may feel like chaotic times, but chaos is our friend. Enter the swirl. There are more opportunities for love, connection, compassion, and even resistance, in the swirl. The nooks, the crannies, the pockets the bumps. It’s not fiction. It’s friction.

They are not just the dangerous limits to growth, but the delightful limits on growth. Our way of modulating the pace, being right here and right now, where maps can’t show because they’re still uncharted, unnamed, and ineffable as the moment itself.

They can’t touch that. They don’t know we’re even here.

—

If this touched you on some level, please don’t just close the tab.

The best thing you can do right now, for this work, for this community, and for this mission, is become a paying member of Team Human on Patreon (where we will be headquartering on all my content). For the cost of a couple of coffees a month, you get ad-free episodes, access to a quarterly webinar where we actually talk, reading lists, resources, the archive of conversations I’ve had with people like Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, and David Lynch, and a community of people who are done pretending this is all fine.

We don’t have corporate backing. We don’t have an algorithm optimizing us for outrage. We have you. Our team.

👉 Join at patreon.com/teamhuman

And if you watched the video version above, please subscribe to me on YouTube. It’s the simplest thing you can do to help more people find this work.

👉 Subscribe at youtube.com/@douglasrushkoff

Find the others. Tell them where we are.