Note: my specific stance to oppose with a steel-man is not about the internet and technology writ large, but about the specific, unhealthy, unquestioned adoption of smartphones, televisions, and algorithmically driven social media platforms that I believe negatively affect people’s lives holistically.
The best case for these prevalent technologies — which we could call channels or mediums — is that they make our lives more convenient, cheap, and easy. Any other argument is deracinated from the needs and realities of the modern person’s life.
Smartphones grant users the ability to shop, work, and socialize in between meetings, on the bus, or in line at the post office. Social media works while you sleep, creating moments, gaining followers, and spreading your past lives across platforms to monetize, promote, and funnel back to your other channels. Event television serves a purpose in providing constant access to the news and frictionless access to a world of content through channels, apps, and libraries of entertainment.
Ultimately, these mediums unify a person’s life architecture around the goals of efficiency, availability, and accomplishment. Productivity abounds for those who give themselves to technology’s convenient, life-shaping structures. From economic productivity comes financial freedom in this paradigm. Out of financial freedom, the techno-optimist finds their version of life — and life to the full.
To fairly argue more past here requires that I shut down the satiri-cynical part of myself that is likely too deeply ingrained.
Is this stance straw or steel? I, for one, have not found a better argument from the holdouts for digital tech.