The ‘Tyranny of Technology’ and Neo-Colonialism
When technology becomes technocracy, it takes away the joy of living and the dignity of life.
Ivan Illich in his 1973 book, Tools for Conviviality, conceptualized the threat that arises when tools and technology reach thresholds beyond which they become irremediably damaging to people and environment. After these thresholds are crossed, tools become destructive not only in cultural and material terms but fatally disabling in personal and collective autonomy. The result is a mega-tooled society embedded in multiple complex systems that curtail people’s ability to live dignified lives. To a world mired in ever-increasing production, while making this production seem ever easier, Illich counterposed the fallacy of the growth imperative and the cultivation of a joyful and balanced acceptance of limits. (Summarized from Designs for the Pluriverse by Arturo Escobar)
“To the threat of technocratic apocalypse, I oppose the vision of a convivial society. Such a society will rest on social contracts that guarantee to each person the broadest and freest access to the tools of the community… . A plurality of limited tools and of convivial organizations would foster a diversity of moves of living that would acknowledge both memory and the inheritance form the past as creation.” ~Ivan Illich
What needs to change is an entire way of life and a whole style of world making — “a transition from the hegemony of modernity’s one-world ontology to a pluriverse of socio-natural configurations.” The dualist and reductionist ontology of the Eurocentric narrative has brought us to a civilizational conjuncture with its implications for leadership, organizational models, policy-making and politics, structures, ethics, and values. The alternative is the deep notion of relationality arising from a profound understanding of the indelible interconnections of all sentient beings and the Planet.
The ecological and cultural transitions needed can only be arrived at through a deep design revolution, which requires nothing less than a reinvention of the human. This transition requires a significant reorientation of all imaginings and conceptions that today arise from a functionalist, rationalistic, and industrial traditions supported by the current meta-narrative of profit and productivity. There has to be a shift in consciousness towards a set of practices and sensemaking attuned to the relational and non-dualist dimensions of life. This is an ontological and cosmological approach that affects our ways of being, knowing, doing, and relating in every domain.
We are currently faced with ‘the tyranny of technology’ where technocracy becomes the norm. One tool and one invention at a time, technology insidiously creeps up on us. After a point, life seems unimaginable without it. The smartphone is a case in point. This deep entanglement brings with it a certain exoticness and power beyond previous imaginings. This makes tools not only addictive but also appear indispensable. To quote Paul Kingsnorth, “The screen has abolished time, distance, boredom, longing. Is anything you see on it real? But then, what is ‘reality’? Who decides? Do you find this notion oppressive, restricting? Then redefine it. Make anything real. Make everything new. The Machine can help you.”
Let me clarify that I am not a Luddite, and I use my fair share of tools for my convenience. The very presence of this online platform gives me a previously unimagined reach; video technology brings the world closer; and many such tools are definitely to be applauded. The trouble starts when tools take over, entwining with humans and distorting the power equations. When tools move from the locus of facilitator to controller, they have an invisible alienating influence. Being ubiquitous, they begin to gradually subvert the very notions of relationality, humanity, and dignity. The tools rule and societies start fetishizing technology.
Those without access to or not desiring such tools disappear behind the abyssal line. Collective wisdom is lost leaving behind disconnected, disembodied, disenchanted individuals suffering from the dis-ease of incessant dissatisfaction. The power of technology to connect and build communities are distorted into deeper atomization of individuals, fragmentation of society, and disruption to the flow of meaning and knowledge.
AI chatbots like chatGPT poses very real dangers to society as a whole. If it can script software, it can also code malware. If it can churn out an academic paper, so can it spew out phishing emails that are perfectly constructed and hence evades suspicion. The mindless development of these tools poses not only ethical challenges but very real dangers of further exacerbating misinformation and disinformation that are already polarizing societies and communities across the globe. The development of technology has taken on a very dark turn in the last two decades as venture capitalists rush to make money, and politics is driven by the top billionaires. Apart from these considerations, there is a whole side to the development of AI and other such uber tech that are kept carefully hidden lest they besmirch the glitz and glory.
Let’s examine chatGPT and the hoopla around it for a moment. It becomes clear that in spite of the almost magical powers of high tech, the imaginings of the innovators are still entrapped by and within the narrative of profit and productivity. This AI chatbot has been trained on diverse pools of data bases to basically configure and deliver products — business plans, academic papers, codes, and what not. The problem is that it has been trained on data bases that are reflective of the Eurocentric, homogenous narrative running the show today. And what it churns out in response to cues reflect that. Let me digress a bit and insert a couple of excerpts on how this works, and who pays the price for this glitzy development.
Exclusive: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic by Billy Perrigo: The data labelers employed by Sama on behalf of OpenAI were paid a take-home wage of between around $1.32 and $2 per hour depending on seniority and performance.
Another excerpt on AI from an article by Patricia Gestoso, How artificial intelligence is recolonising the Global South:
On self-driven cars: Self-driven car algorithms need millions of high-quality images labelled by annotators — workers who assess and identify all the elements on each image. And the industry wants these annotated images at the lowest possible cost. Enter: annotators in the Global South.
Annotators in Venezuela are paid an average of 90 cents an hour with some being paid as low as 11 cents/hour. The situation is similar for their counterparts in North Africa.
The injustice is not only about low pay, but also in work conditions. Workers are under constant pressure because the data-labelling platforms have quota systems that remove annotators from projects if they fail to meet targets for the completion of tasks. The algorithms keep annotators bidding for new gigs day and night, because high-paying tasks may only last seconds on their screens before disappearing.
Big tech like AI is not appearing magically out of thin air with a little help from Silicon Valley. They are arising from the current hegemonic narrative and are serving to further embed the foundational aspects — deep separation from nature, hyper-individualism, denial of all limits, and profound arrogance of human capability. The marginalization of other myriad forms of knowing, learning, being, and doing that have existed for thousands of years are further intensified in the name of progress and efficiency. All counter-hegemonic and alternate epistemologies and ontologies arising from the Global South* are dexterously made invisible by sheer omission. The threat of technocracy is very real.
I have been having this conversation with some of my dear friends namely, Trina Casey, Lana Kristine Jelenjev and Garry Turner, on the pernicious impact of such tools. The mythical increase in productivity is being achieved at what cost? Who is paying the price? Who are the beneficiaries? What is being lost? By automating essentially creative tasks, such tools may try to supersede human function.
However, the trouble lies in the very element of its ‘tool-ness’. A tool is without consciousness or conscience; its impact is only as good or as evil as the intentions and purposes that were designed into it. For example, to test chatGPT’s repertoire, I had posed a few question — five to be precise — on topics like decolonization, pluriverse, neo-colonialism, and negritude. Needless to say, the responses were facile and so heavily North-centric as to be laughable.
When such tools invade education, teachers are exhorted to be more inventive. The fundamental premise of education is lost when tools churn out essays and solve problems. The whole notion of learning, discerning, appreciating, critiquing, reflecting is completely disregarded. It is terrifying to imagine generations being brought up without the wisdom and appreciation of beauty that true learning imparts. Ethics, values and human dignity are being sacrificed at the altar of a homogenous narrative that is seeking to further control and templatize this messy world.
I fear for the tech-dazzled youth of today. The entire journey of humans has been one of intense and abiding creativity right from the cave paintings to the elaborate tombs of Egyptian pharaohs, from the rock-cut temples in India to the paintings in the Louvre. Humans have an innate need to create. Let me correct that — all life forms have a need to create. One just has to see the nest of a humble Baya weaver bird to see this.
When technology becomes technocracy, it takes away the joy of living and the dignity of life. as Ivan Illich pointed out fifty years ago: The result is a mega-tooled society embedded in multiple complex systems that curtail people’s ability to live dignified lives. Currently, we are in an Era of Technocracy. The movement towards further techni-fication feels almost inexorable but it is not. These are choices being made in the halls of power to invest the current narrative with greater power, to extend its lifetime, to embed it in all its forms in all aspects of people’s lives. Then, we will reach a stage where — entangled and entwined with our tools — we will lose sight of other ways of being, knowing, doing, and relating. I believe it’s a very deliberate attempt to erase the heterogeneity of this wondrously pluriversal planet and instead create a “one-world” world that the Global North has always wanted. At least, the top 1% wanted.
It is easier to rule over a planet from where all differences and diversity have been wiped clean. Where the messiness of life, serendipity of conversations, and spontaneity of creativity have been controlled and homogenized into standardized template responses. Then of course, the natural world is a huge impediment. Instead of being just a free-provider of resources, nature is now striking back in the forms of floods, fires, and furies. The control so desired has somehow slipped by.
But there is still that last drop of oil to be extracted, the last iota of cobalt to be excavated. And why? “Cobalt is a critical component in every lithium-ion rechargeable battery used in mobile phones, laptops and electric cars. The Democratic Republic of Congo provides 60% of the world’s cobalt supply which is mined by 40,000 children, according to UNICEF estimates. They are paid $1–2 for working up to 12 hours a day and inhaling toxic cobalt dust.” ~How artificial intelligence is recolonizing the Global South. Here’s a link to a video on Inside the Congo cobalt mines that exploit children.
It will not end only at the exploitation of labour. It is seeking to completely eradicate diverse epistemologies, cosmologies, and ontologies that are in contradiction to the dominant, hegemonic, narrative of power.
A detour:
While speculating on the technological marvels, I was reflecting on the arrival of East India Company in India and the subsequent de-industrialization that followed. The textile industry of handwoven cloth that India excelled in was systematically destroyed to create a market for the mill-manufactured cloth from England. India became a provider of raw material and a market for the British mill-made cloth. “When the East India Company took control of the country, in the chaos that ensued after the collapse of the Mughal empire, India’s share of world GDP was 23 percent. When the British left it was just above 3 percent.” ~An Era of Darkness by Shahsi Tharoor.
I was wondering along the same vein what are the human skills, capabilities, and faculties that tools like chatGPT are out to destroy in the name of progress. This new form of colonialism is far more pernicious because it not only colonizes the imagination but also eradicates the possibilities to envision other futures. This conditioning aims at making people conform with what feels like inescapable destiny. The same logic seems to be prevailing of controlling, objectifying, automating, homogenizing, and destruction of the creative vitality that is an essential human function. Given that the whole so-called innovation is based on an essentially extractive and exploitative economy says it all.
Conformist action is the routinized, reproductive, repetitive practice which reduces realism to what exists and just because it exists.
~ Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide
*Global South is not a geographical location but a metaphorical identity that enfolds the unseen and the unheard, the disowned and the disavowed, the delegitimized, invisibilized, and demonized billions. Global South exists in the peripheries, ghettoes, slums, and margins everywhere. They exist in the shape of refugees, migrants, the homeless, the uprooted, the vagrants. They also exist in their own homelands — they are those whose land has been expropriated in the name of progress and development. They are the tribals, the adivasis, the indigenous people. They are the keepers of the wild and stewards of vanishing languages.
Website: Pluriversal Planet
LinkedIn: Sahana Chattopadhyay — Scribe to an emergent era
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