The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘technology’ as: noun, ‘scientific knowledge used in practical ways in industry, for example in designing new machines, science and technology’. The definition is benign, factual, neutral. But technological advancement is far from innocuous: indeed, tech-driven change and revolution have single-handedly been the primary forces of disruption for nigh-on six centuries. The advent of new society-shaking innovations—the printing press, the steam train, Edison’s lightbulb to name a few classics—always sends the wheel of fortune careening like a Catherine wheel, shifting social dynamics, class structures and the economic balance.
Polarisation, disruption and extremism are a predictable corollary of this social upheaval, and yet, somehow, the 21st-century tech revolution is different. Pumping out of Silicon Valley with its broligarch figureheads—Peter Thiel (PayPal, Palantir Technologies), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon, Perplexity AI), Sundar Pichai (Alphabet Inc.), David Sacks (Craft Ventures), Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, X, and xAI) — our current tech revolution is characterised by its voraciousness and its velocity. And it is precisely this velocity that is facilitating societal polarisation on an unprecedented scale.
Is the Tech Revolution the new Gutenberg Press?
Mainz, proto-Germany. The year is 1440. The goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg invents the movable-type printing press. The guilder turned innovator creates the Leviathan of literacy: the manuscript is out, print is in. 15 years later, the first printed version of the Vulgate is released in the form of the eponymous Gutenberg Bible and from this moment onwards, books, books, books abound. Printed material is accessible to the masses, the ‘pearls are being tossed to the swine’ (John Florio), or the veil of ignorance is being lifted—depends who you ask.
It is undeniable that Gutenberg’s new technology was the gem-like flame illuminating and cutting through the melancholic Medieval penumbra. Misha Glenny, as we sat over goulash and a melange coffee at the Cafe Museum in Vienna, was adamant: the universalisation of ‘the book had a massive impact on social relations…it fundamentally changed the way that people relate to each other’. And it is this juncture of human relations, the vis-a-vis of everyday life, that explains technology’s incendiary capacity for revolution.
The Gutenberg press was a relation-reforming and profoundly controversial technology. Filippo di Strata, a Dominican friar, poet and copyist, would even proclaim ‘Est virgo hec penna, meretrix est stampificata’ (the pen is a virgin; the printing press is a whore). The newfangled development was deemed a societal threat. Its contribution to and acceleration of the Wars of Religion that ravaged Europe in the 16th century is remarkable. The circulation of ideas via the more readily accessible book and the vulgarisation of the Bible via translations into the vernacular, enabled the so-called ‘heresy’ (Protestantism) to be adopted by states—Denmark, Sweden, and England inter alia—initiating a simultaneous religious, social and political binarism. As di Strata’s aphorism reminds us, technologies are polarising forces—parallel to the virgin-whore complex—and their polarisation sows the seeds of extremism.
The arrival of the printed book, alongside the invention of advanced weapons and naval technology, meant that by the late 15th to early 16th century, technological innovation came to a head, setting the stage for the Wars of Religion, a conflict which arose out of a polarisation in Europe which is not dissimilar to the polarisation we see today.
The next epoch-altering technological revolution came in the form of the industrialisation and the water wheels and steam engines of the late 18th to early 19th century and suddenly, polarisation manifested itself as class struggle. Class stratification tapered to a fine point in the 1800s, leading to the massive disruption, imperial collapse and the formation of nation states which would eventually culminate in WW1.
In essence, technological innovation is the productive and disruptive bound up in one bundle: a Frankenstein’s creature in its own right. This is the theory propounded by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in the book Why Nations Fail. It argues that states collapse because neoliberal elites fear ‘creative destruction’—the process where new technology replaces old—as it threatens their institutionalised power and wealth. Instead of fostering innovation, educated elites stifle change, preferring stagnation to revolution. They fear and thus dismiss rapid technological innovation, and although their fear is justified, it cannot be quashed and thus cannot be ignored.
The primary issue with rapid technological advancements is not the innovation itself, rather the inability of a society to sufficiently and efficiently adapt to the huge economic transformation that it unleashes. The world was not ready for the book, and the deluge of ideas that would arise out of it: religious extremism, violence, relatability. Similarly Misha explained, ‘internet technologies today are developing at such a speed, in a way that technology has never developed before, that the impact on social relations is exponential.’ It is out of this unmitigated exponential growth that extremism once again rears its head in today’s society, and the AI boom cannot be extricated from the landslide populist movements across the world.
Where lie the roots of today’s political extremism?
How is the technological revolution yoked to the populist movement? The first thing to define is the term ‘populism’ itself. Deriving from the Latin word populus (‘people’) combined with the suffix -ism, denoting a doctrine or practice, in this case the deliberate and divisive polarisation of society into the ‘good’ versus the ‘corrupt elite’.
But today’s populism has many faces, many forms, and is not necessarily for the ‘people’. Fukuyama would have us call it ‘illiberalism’ instead, and Ivan Krashev of the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna argues that defining populism is like asking a German, French and Swiss child where babies come from. The German child will say ‘a stork brings the baby’, the French ‘that it comes from the chambre’, and a Swiss child ‘that it depends which canton you’re in’. Just like the plurality of cantons and opinions, there is no such thing as populism proper; it is different everywhere you look.
What unites the populist movement however, is the scapegoating of the system and promise to ‘reform’ and undo institutional failure. There is a prevailing myth of the populist leader who can ‘de-rig’ the structures in place and beckon in change (driven in part by tech). This, according to Misha Glenny, seduces voters who, in many cases, feel let down and disappointed by the policies of the late capitalists of the neoliberal era.
Indeed, we can trace the populist movement directly back to the financial crash of 2008. ‘Late capitalists, the neo liberalists, they extracted vast quantities of money. They got involved in a speculative bubble game using the banks and the hedge fund strategy, and they inflated the value of their nominal holdings to four times that of the assets they really had. 2008 happens and do the banks pay? The banks don’t pay—not a single banker goes to jail—for the orgy of speculation they were involved in. Who pays? The tax payer. Who bails out the national Westminster bank? The taxpayer does. Who bails out Wall Street? Under Obama, it is the American taxpayer who bails out Wall Street.’ [Glenny]
The experiment of governmental neoliberalism failed but, out of its ashes, there rose a far more sinister, alternative force. The fallout of the financial crash had created a fecund atmosphere in which populists thrive and in which populists learn, ‘much more quickly than progressives and liberals, how to mobilise the mass media side of the internet to generate a convincing narrative for those people that feel post-2008 that they’ve been dispossessed and screwed by the system which they have been.’ [Glenny]
‘The genius of populism is to ensure that they persuade the people screwed by the system to come to the wrong political conclusion. This is where we are now.’ And the tech revolution is flooring the gas of this process.
We stand at a critical juncture: populism is an exponential J-shaped curve on the axes of European political preferences. The ‘techno-fascist’ tendencies of its leaders are manifest, and they are able to understand and weaponise the potential capacity of tech in a way that neo-liberals are not. The structure of tech ownership is a major part of the problem. Single individuals possess vast amounts of power, wealth and vested political interest. When Microsoft is able to shut down the email account of the ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan following U.S. sanctions imposed by the Trump administration due to Khan’s prosecution of war crimes, alarm bells should start ringing very loudly. When Elon Musk is single-handedly sustaining Ukraine’s internet connection, Ukraine bows to the whims of a single hand.
Politicians are using algorithms to compound and polarise, to influence electoral habits, exploiting an almost regulation-free platform by which it can access a massive audience. Take Victor Orban’s use of anti-Brussels, anti-Ukraine AI videos posted on Facebook and Instagram in spite of META’s ban on political advertisement.
The tech revolution is constantly being cunningly abused by various political parties, above all else the technocrat billionaire class, and their very goal is to ‘defang the institutional strength of democracy…in order to secure both financial and political power and domination’ the like of which has never been seen before on such a huge scale. The nearest historical comparison we have is the robber barons in the United States in the late 19th century who amassed a great monopoly of wealth and used it as a political instrument. Yet, the institutions of state in the US were strong enough to drive through the anti-trust laws that led to the disbanding of those robber barons. Whether our current democratic institutions still retain the necessary strength is another question entirely. Worse yet, given the stealth of the algorithms which, unlike the titanic monopolists of a century ago, can subtly weave their web of influence, will we wake up to the threat in time?
The genius of populism is to ensure that they persuade the people screwed by the system to come to the wrong political conclusion. This is where we are now.
Misha Glenny
The smokescreen must be lifted
There is a very apt French idiom which reads: Si c’est gratuit, c’est vous le produit (If something appears free, then you must be the product). It neatly describes the essence of how the tech platforms are ever so subtly able to exploit their users through surveillance capitalism.
Historically speaking, the essence of capitalism is syphoning off the cream of the profits—setting up a factory, giving people employment but paying them less than they earn. Post 1990, value has transferred away from labour and towards data. Suddenly, the online commodification of personal data became the most valuable product on the market. And ownership of these products is established via the provision of services, marketed as free, but richly paid for via the data the platforms gather and redistribute, quantifying and tracking patterns of behaviour to sell on to advertisement companies.
Data are commodified: they can monitor people’s habits, tracking them in a way that no polling or advertising company has ever previously been able to do. The ‘I agree’ tick boxes to the T&Cs implicitly relinquish your confidentiality rights. The fact that The Economist can track when Zack Polanski wakes and sleeps based on the times at which he is most active online, can predict when he will most predictably like posts…this invasion of privacy is dystopian, and we are all victim to it. The value of data is that tech companies don’t have to pay for it; they own you, for free.
Misha Glenny recommended Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power as an excellent read in order to understand this phenomenon more comprehensively. In the third section of the book’s first chapter, Zuboff articulates that ‘Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as “machine intelligence,” and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later.’ When this data is sold on to parties with political incentives, when populist leaders are willing to resort to the most manipulative and corrupt of measures to secure electoral support…this is where the limits of democracy lie.
And this is why our current democratic institutions may not be strong enough to withstand the pressure of the technological revolution. Misha Glenny gave me some stats, impressively from memory: when you realise that in 2023 Volkswagen employed over 600,000 people and made circa 17.5 billion euros, whilst Google employed a mere 200,000 people and made over 70 billion dollars in profit, the risk of the tech revolution is put into figures. The numbers are extortionate.
We have had disruptive technologies before. This is an indisputable truth. From the telescope to the microchip. And yet, we are experiencing something that is without precedent because its scale is simply so immense—unimaginably so. And this immensity is the reason why we must, without delay, demystify tech policy for both politicians and for individuals alike. We must grow cognisant to what we are giving away, to what the ‘tech bros’ possess and to whom they are feeding this information. Otherwise we willingly, and without protest, sacrifice our autonomy and privacy allowing strangers—the tech bros at that—to control us.
We must not push away AI, technology and surveillance capitalism as a ‘complex phenomenon’ that we do not understand and thus is not relevant to us. Rather, it is our issue, it is our imperative, it is our sovereign interest as individuals and as nations to be engaged, active, subversive, resistant, vocal.
We have had disruptive technologies before. But we have also had rebels and resistants, whistleblowers and change-makers. So, with this in mind, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night/ rage, rage, against the dying of the light.’
Many thanks to Misha Glenny for his time, wisdom and insights.
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