Social Media, Technology and the Modern Age: How Change was Replaced by a Designed Illusion

In the past, we may not have thought of design as the terrain on which the future of democracy would be decided. But that was before we entered into an age in which more and more of the designed objects and interactions we encounter became silently curated, positioned and politicised without our consent.

The great triumph of handheld technology is the lie it conceals. Ever-present and portable, it draws our attention downwards, off-wards, at right-angles to the march of life before us. As long as our heads are bent, we’re captive, placing faith in an impermanent, implied plane of living. We buy into an illusion, seeing ourselves walking upon the plane and shaping history as we pass across it. Our experience is of a real-time slew of apparently consequential events, as opposed to the simulation it is. We find ourselves endlessly, but transitorily, invested in the lives of everyone we know; made into a single, breathing organism of evolutionary progress. And yet, in pandering to this joint surface-life, we belie the true, hidden unchange concealed beneath the visible. While we fiddle, Rome burns.

Unchange is the unwritten mission of modern technology design, its principles slowly solidifying from incidental side-effects into core principles. The ever-repeating…