A couple weekends back, I drove out to one of those rural, forgotten Virginia counties for a security training class held at a private gun range. I spent the back third of the seventy-minute drive ambling down country roads, less hilly out in eastern plains than those closer to Charlottesville, passing acres of field and forest and the kind of suburban subdevelopments are filled with the kind of mini-McMansions that have brick on the front and vinyl on the back. In other words, I was far from the blue-haired, queer, tattooed liberalism that technology votaries assume fill the neo-luddite ranks. In a class of seven or eight, most everyone there was doing a certification to take a job managing site security for the data centers cropping up all over Virginia.

The attendees came from all over—the Northern Neck, Fredricksburg, Richmond—and their backgrounds were diverse. After a couple of awkward initial hours, the class started to loosen up and during breaks we got to chatting and before long, the conversation drifted towards data centers and Flock cameras. All across the United States, communities are rising up against the encroachment of these technologies. Conservative communities are dropping Flock contracts,¹ and residents are making their anger heard about data centers in council meeting nationwide. In one case, data center executives fled town after townsfolk brought a guillotine.

The optics for the technology side have not been great. A farmer was arrested for speaking a few seconds over his time. A grand jury simply failed to indict someone who was caught on camera dismantling a Flock camera. And it goes on. The opposition to the tech industry injecting itself into our daily lives is perhaps the strongest bipartisan issue we’ve seen in decades, and for good reason. We chide each other to “touch grass” when someone gets churlish online, but when Flock is watching our parks and playgrounds what are we to do then?

Universally, everyone in the class was against the further development of this tech. I shared that my power bill went up 18% since last year (normalizing for usage). Everyone else’s did, too. “We’re at a gun range,” I asked, “would any of you be ok with a Flock camera at the end of the street?”

“Hell fuckin’ no.”

There’s an argument that invariably comes up when people start discussing the ethics of technology. They’ll say something like, “technology can be used for good or bad, it depends on the person using it. The technology is neutral.” Often they’ll throw in an analogy: “a hammer can be used to build a house or kill a person.”

This facile argument is perhaps deep when you’re thirteen years old, but I find its persistent presence among otherwise intelligent people to be infuriating. The problem with the argument emerges from the distillation of the argument down to just subject and object, the user and the technology. The problem with this reduction is that the grammar of the world is more complex than this. Technology—and people—live in a social context. That social context is load bearing in the determination of the ethics of a technology. (I’ll take an aside here to note that there is no single “ethics.” Ethical frameworks exist themselves within social contexts and what may be ethical in one situation, say journalism, may not be in another, say law, and vice versa). More than that, the context is determinative of the ethics of both the existence and use of a technology.

Take the hammer. It’s absolutely true that I can use it to build a house (well, perhaps a bookshelf) or to kill or seriously injure someone. In our actual world, however, we have laws specifically about that second option. Most jurisdictions have different statutes that distinguish between simple assault and assault with a deadly weapon. There’s a weight in seriousness given to the magnitude of the harms that can arise from wielding a hammer like a weapon instead of a tool. If I beat someone with a hammer, I will go to jail, lose my job, get sued and lose my house, or be socially shunned, or some combination of the above. See, we forget that between subject and object goes verb, and its these verbs onto which our ethics most often supervene, not the nouns.

So, I would argue, the ethical charge on a hammer skews positive, not merely because its design intention is creation, but also because it is manufactured in a world full of agreements that bear strict consequences on anyone who uses it for harm. The hammer is forged in a world connected by social bonds.

I was in the Target Center in Minneapolis earlier this year weeping alongside nineteen thousand other people. Bruce Springsteen, an artist whose work has sustained and saved my life on more than one occasion, had just wrapped a two-year world tour when he was sickened by the ICE invasion of Minneapolis, the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the kidnapping and deportations of thousands of people from communities all over the country. I saw him on this tour in Berlin last year, my last day living in that dear city, and tears streamed down my face then, too, at his powerful monologues about the country I was returning home to. When he extended that tour to bring his message back home, he decided the first date should be in Minneapolis, where he delivered his powerful lyrics to a grieving city.

My father said, “Son, we’re lucky in this town
It’s a beautiful place to be born
It just wraps its arms around you
Nobody crowds you, and nobody goes it alone”
“Your flag flying over the courthouse
Means certain things are set in stone
Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t”

Bruce Springsteen’s America has always been a complicated place. It’s a place where your best dreams can be dashed to pieces on the rocks, but it’s the place where you could dare to dream them. It’s a place where the best and worst in people can come out and fight it out, find resolution, find forgiveness or find faith. He has never shied away from the ugly side of the country, but he has never let the ugly side lead him to dismay. For Bruce, the everyman was always the hero of his own story, but his heroes never had to go it alone.

You sit and wonder just who’s gonna stop the rain
Who’ll ease the sadness? Who’s gonna quiet your pain?
It’s a long dark highway and a thin white line
Connecting, baby, your heart to mine
We’re runnin’ now, but, darlin’, we will stand in time
To face the ties that bind

It strikes me that the culture of the technology sector has preserved so much of the contemptuous, isolated nerd culture that thrived when computer science was still a niche discipline. When I grew up, being into computers made you a geek and it was not exactly a recipe for popularity. Subcultures tend naturally to grow via exclusion, but some foster egalitarianism while others tend to reify the hiearchical structures that pushed them to the fringes in the first place. Nerd culture was certainly the latter. It was competitive instead of collaborative, contemptuous instead of complimentary. That culture has persisted through the various generations of waging war on codes of conduct, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), or even on women in the workplace.

This culture today has manifested in the philosophy of “move fast and break things”, and even one of the pioneers of computer science popularized the phrase “it is easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.” The willingness and capabilities of big tech companies to move without regard for social boundaries, and with such speed that they outpace any attempt to repair, is one of the reasons that technology firms have the full yahtzee in top five global companies by revenue. Sometime in the last three decades, one of the most socially maladjusted subcultures in American society found themselves in possession of the keys to the greatest wealth creation engine humankind has ever created.

For a while, that was mostly harmless. The internet was a superfluous part of most of our lives. Sure, we had email for work, and we browsed and surfed the web, but we still spoke to our friends at baseball games or church or over brunch or drinks, we shopped in brick and mortars, we watched our local news after putting the kids to bed. These activities, too, were part of the social contract.

I’ve long argued that the decay started when we replaced pages with feeds. A web page is finite, you can read it start to finish and you have to make a conscious and active decision to click through to something else. A feed is infinite; you scroll and scroll and it never ends, there’s always more content to consume, there’s always another opinion to devour. People love blaming The Algorithm,² and rightly so, but it was infinite scroll that was the first dagger to penetrate human psychology. Infinite scroll shattered the glass ceiling on the attention economy and it made it easy for everything else to come in and fray our social fabric.

All of this is getting worse. None of it is getting better. Tech oligarchs hobnob with the White House to build mass surveillance infrastructure with massive, no bid contracts that are going uncontested. State legislatures are passing ill-conceived age verification laws that are proving to be a predictable privacy nightmare. And the rise of AI, either legitimately or not, is proving to be a salient argument for headcount reduction across multiple industry sectors. What this represents is possibly the single largest transfer of wealth in human history, and the pace of that transfer is accelerating. The frictionless ability for the tech industry to be able to just do whatever the fuck it wants to, whenever it wants to, only serves as proof positive for devotees of this hyper-individualistic, meritocratic culture that long ago veered into fascism and millennarianism.

We stand now thirty seconds from midnight.

Earlier this year, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, patented the ability to have an AI take over your account when you die and continue posting using models trained on your past data. I predicted this years ago when I coined “Zuckerberg’s Basilisk” to describe the coercive threat of a digital purgatory to induce you to surrender more and more data to the machine. The idea that you could live on not just in a digital afterlife, but one which can continue interacting with your loved ones in the world of the living, may seem ludicrous, but humans are fast to renorm. Not so long ago, the idea of connecting a car to the internet was absurd; today, almost every new vehicle sold contains an always-on modem transmitting a steady stream of your driving data back to the manufacturer. The idea of connecting a refrigerator to the internet was a punchline, today it’s a feature. We wear our Apple Watches during sex and surrender our heartbeat and skin temperature to big brother, who will know how long we perform and whether or not we climax.

Last year, Amazon whitewashed its Ring camera surveillance network by bringing home a puppy in a Super Bowl ad. Maybe next year, or in five years, or ten, Meta will similarly launder us an ad showing a digital, deceased daddy emoting and walking his still-alive daughter down the aisle, his smiling AI-rendered likeness projected directly into the retinas of every attendee through their Meta Ray-bans.

The first problem with playing God is that a lot of people already have one they believe in. The second problem is that unlike the City of God, digital heaven has an address in Loudon County, Virginia or New Albany, Ohio. Or in Bahrain.

While I was at my security training, one of the other students was saying that she was encouraging her clients to hire armed security guards for data centers, due to the high risk of vandalism and theft. Tech executives are surely taking note, and there has already been some suggestion that these are constructed on military bases to increase their security and bypass zoning concerns. A very real conflict is coming. Today it is playing out in townhalls between tech oligarchs and strange alliances of radical leftist transgender lesbians and gun-toting, Republican rednecks. Someday soon it may become kinetic.

We will need to start writing songs about our time, because so much of what we know has been torn up and consumed to be digitized in formats that no one knows will be usable in even just a few decades, if it even survives that long.

In Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan explored the life of a complicated man who couldn’t quite come to terms with what he unleashed on the world. In The Odyssey, Nolan’s Odysseus laments conceiving the Trojan horse trick. He mourns the broken covenant that keeps humans human even when they are enemies, the erosion of honor and dignity even in bloody conflict. Nolan’s filmmaking technique, it can be noted, eschews the use of computer generated imagery in favor of practical effects, even at great expense. One may call him a Luddite for doing so, perhaps. But Nolan is making a statement with both what he says and how he says it. The contemptuous cleverness of the self-appointed elite is not delivering us salvation. It is driving us apart, driving us further into a more violent and uncertain world. Our insatiable lust to push boundaries at any cost is breaking the fragile bonds of men. It is a warning.

What follows will leave a scar visible only through what can no longer be recovered.