A Life Beyond Shadows

What if everything you believed about the world was just an illusion? That unsettling question led me to rethink my relationship with Big Tech.

I haven’t posted here for a while because I’ve been struggling with something.

I’m increasingly uncomfortable with Big Tech and how it defines my reality through social media, through products like mobile phones, and access to technologies such as AI.

How did I get here?

There’s a guy who’s been dead for 2500 years who turned my life upside down.

No, don’t worry dear reader, I’m not going to talk to you about Jesus.

But I am going to use memes that are as ancient in Internet years to illustrate my point.

Plato is the guy that made me think more, made me wonder if there was more than the world as defined on the screens I use all day every day.

Plato lived in Ancient Greece around 2500 years ago and is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy.

Don’t just take my word for it, the Wachowskis took this guy’s work, added Hollywood stardust, some martial arts and neat special effects to it to create the first Matrix movie.

A key piece is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which goes something like this:

Some people are imprisoned in a cave, they have no contact with the real world.

They are restrained so they cannot turn their heads, they can only look dead ahead.

Behind them is a fire they cannot see, in front of that, a walkway they cannot see.

On the walkway, puppeteers move objects and people about, casting shadows on the wall ahead of the prisoners.

Because this is all they can see, the prisoners believe the shadows are reality.

If a prisoner escapes from the cave, the overwhelm created by the realisation there is so much more to the world than just shadows expands their mind and they gain a new understanding.

The prisoners can no longer be satisfied with the world of only shadows.

If they return to the cave and try to convince those still trapped of a bigger world outside they are met with disbelief and fear. Some people just don’t want to know and are happy in their ignorance.

Remind you of anything? 

Nope? Come with me on this journey.

Social media is the shadows on the walls of the cave. The billionaire Big Tech founders are the puppeteers.

This is what I saw beyond the shadows and how Plato helped me see a world beyond.

Mainstream tech now sells the ability to create a version of reality (your product can appear top of Google search aka 'most relevant' if you have the money). 

If you can make people believe in your version of reality, you can make them make choices based on the reality they believe in. 

You can make them make choices that benefit YOU and disadvantage them.

I work in tech because rules of late-stage capitalism insist I must do something to get money just to pay for the things that keep me alive.

I’m genuinely interested in the philosophy and process around creating artificial intelligence. It’s utterly fascinating. What is intelligence anyway and who gets to decide? What does it mean to be conscious?

I want to return to the questions that got me into tech: how can tech assist humans? How can it benefit everyone?

But as the tech that embeds deeper and deeper into our lives is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, it gets hard to get excited about their interests. 

Especially when their interests run to making everything shitter and more expensive for everyone except them.

I used to believe in the democratising power of tech, what we have now is the opposite. 

Plato radicalised me and now I can’t go back.

My old world model is dead and I'm going to build a new one. 

I'm not going to let Big Tech do it for me and tell me it's my reality.

It starts with small things: cancelling Amazon Prime, searching using DuckDuckGo, and reducing my mobile phone use to spend less time looking at the shadows created by puppeteers.

The new reality starts here.