Shitnology

Why Technology Isn’t Lifting Us Out of Econo-Hell (And What to Do About It)

**GLOBAL NEWS NETWORK**
**TRANSCRIPT: AN INTERVIEW WITH THE WORLD’S RICHEST MAN***

Anderson Tanner: So. How does it feel?
Umair Haque: Pretty good, Anderson. But I didn’t do it for the money, the power, or the fans.
AT: No? Then why?
UH [innocently]: To change the world for the better, Anderson. I want to inspire people!
AT: And you have. Let’s review how you changed the world, Mr Haque. You discovered the secret to immortality. Giving old blood people the fresh, vibrant blood of young people. Today, your company, Life Inc, is the world’s first trillion dollar corporation.
UH [modestly]: It’s not immortality, Anderson. Just rejuvenation. You see, young blood contains more life-giving elements than old blood. So it slows the aging process. 
AT: Right. People around the world lined up, astonished. The old practically stormed down your doors for Life, your branded trademark for young people’s blood. And the young lined up eagerly to become what you call “Life Partners”, donors at your Blood Farms. 
UH: LifeCenters, Anderson. We don’t like the term “Blood Farms”. LifeCenters! We gave the old new life. And we gave the young new jobs. When the economy needed them! The millions of young people employed at our LifeCenters are finally productive members of society, not basement-dwelling failures. 
AT: But they spend the day…sitting around…watching Netflix…swiping and tapping on status updates…while their blood’s drawn into gigantic reservoirs. What are they really “producing”?
UH: Life, Anderson! They click ads, too. They order stuff online! They flirt with and harass people! Everybody wins. 
AT [dubious]: Some have complained that you only pay them minimum wage.
UH: That’s true. It’s not skilled labor, Anderson. Anyone can do it! We’re an equal opportunity employer. But we can only pay them what they deserve. After all, mostly, they’re just sitting there. It’s the easiest job in the world. They can even surf the web and watch internet porn while they “work”!
AT: You’re worth trillions. Don’t you sell the blood at what some have called an “obscene markup”?
UH: Nobody listens to Poul Krugmann. If they did, we’d still be stuck in 1992. Look, it’s not immoral to make money. We’re giving people life.
AT: Some have noted that giving blood as a…job…debilitates people, and so they can’t do much more than that with their lives. It leaves them exhausted and sick. Drained, if you’ll pardon the pun. So they can’t study, learn, create, build, dream. All they’re ever going to be is…blood donors.
UH: Look, Anderson. Jobs are hard work. Don’t you work hard?
AT: But economists say that you’re not creating any real value. You’re giving life to the old. But only by taking it away from the young. After, all they never seem to reach their potential in the economy you’ve created.
UH [angry]: Anderson, do you want take the greatest gift humanity’s ever received? Sure, let’s go back to the Stone Age. Asshole.
AT: But what happens when the young get old? How will they be able to afford Life? After all, it costs as much as a McMansion. And they can’t even afford those.
UH: Well, we have financing options available.
AT: But what if they don’t have incomes? 
UH: Well, Anderson, they’re going to inherit McMansions from their parents, right? They can trade those in for Life!
AT: But what if their parents never die?
UH: Ummm….well…
AT: You see, Umair, it seems to me as if there’s something wrong here. You’re making trillions by skimming it off Blood Farms that the young spend their lives so that the old never die. But nobody’s becoming tomorrow’s great doctors, engineers, artists, writers, creators, entrepreneurs. They’re all debilitated by crappy minimum wage jobs where they’re jacked into IVs all day long that literally suck the life out of them.
UH [pitying]: You just don’t get it, Anderson. We changed the world! Who needs tomorrow’s artists, engineers, and so on? Yesterday’s are still alive! Look. You’ve looked 30 since you were 60, and that was 20 years ago. You’re a regular at our LifeCentres, aren’t you?
AT [blushing]: I am.
UH: So are you exploiting young people by literally sucking the life out of them too? No! You’re giving them opportunities, Anderson. To work! To do something meaningful and noble and true with their lives!! Give you their blood!! And get paid for the privilege!
AT [frowning]: But what happens when even the old can’t afford Life? After all, one day, they’re going to run out of savings to spend on new blood, right?
UH: Well, they can trade their houses and cars in. We have a program!
AT: And when they don’t have houses?
UH: We’ll own all the houses!
AT: No, I mean how do they afford Life then?
UH: They can finance it! 
AT: What if they don’t have jobs? 
UH: They can get jobs!
AT: But there aren’t any jobs left. The only industry that’s growing is giving blood to old people.
UH: Well, then, I suppose…
AT: Don’t you see the problem? You’ve built the perfect business model. You’re going to own everything in the economy. People will give you all they have for more Life. Their houses, cars, investments, savings. But what do they do then? And what do you do then? 
UH: I guess I’ll retire.
AT: But you’ll own everything! And no one else will own anything! 
UH: Isn’t that the point of life?

**END INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT**

The World Greatest Business Model Isn’t Enough. To Create Anything That Fucking Matters.

It’s hard to imagine a technology more powerful than life. In my story, Life, blood that rejuvenates people, is the single greatest technology the world has ever seen, or probably will ever see.

My little scenario above is a limit case, an extreme thought experiment. Maybe it contains a grain of truth, though, because the truth is that lab experiments have shown that young blood does rejuvenate the old. Sorry, you can’t use it for your next sci-fi magnum opus, I just copyrighted it. Here’s it’s point.

You probably think that the greatest technologies that we can imagine are how golden ages of gleaming prosperity happen.

Wrong.

Let’s flesh out my life as an Overlord of Shitnology — technology that glitters and shines, but is more like gold foil on a turd, because, left to its own, it imperils the march of human progress.

The net result of a Life, Inc, left to it’s own devices? Free to pay “workers”, or blood donors, minimum wage, and to charge consumers, or old people, massively extractive rents, like demanding their houses in exchange for Life? Young people wouldn’t have money to spend. Old people would have less and less money to spend. The economy would spiral into a historic depression, from which it could, by itself, never recover.

Life, Inc has the World’s Greatest Business Model. People will beg to pay anything for Life. They’ll give away everything they have to Life, Inc. So it quickly becomes the richest corporation the world has ever known. Pretty soon, it owns everything — people’s houses, cars, belongings, and so on. Maybe it leases them back to people. It doesn’t matter. That’s just financial engineering. In hard economic terms, what’s happened is that people have become poorer. Where they once owned assets, now they don’t. They might have more Life — but they have poorer lives. And as a result of those poorer lives, impoverished in financial, economic, social, emotional, human terms, society declines and the economy stagnates.

WTF!

Somehow, even the greatest technology that you or I can imagine is still not enough to create a vibrant, thriving economy, society, and culture — blossoming lives. Why not? I’ll get to that in a moment. The inescapable lesson is that tech alone simply isn’t enough to create them. Nor can it be. Something more, something deeper, something truer is required. What could that something be?

Technology Minus Prosperity Equals Shitnology

Where would all the money in the economy go? To me! I invented Life, remember? And now I own everything in the economy. So what? What the hell am I going to do with it? My seventh house no more benefits me than me seventeenth pair of shoes. It’s probably empty, just like they are.

You might say: isn’t that a fair trade? Nope. The point of creating real economic value is to make people better off without making them worse off. If I’m letting you live a little longer, but the price is a steep decline in your quality of life, then its unlikely that I’m creating any real value. I’m simply taking away with one hand what I’m giving with the other. Creating real value for Life, Inc would mean it would have to strike a fairer deal with people — consumers, employees, societies, and so forth.

But why should it? After all, it’s patented Life, so it has no competition. It alone holds the rights to sell its technology. Therefore, technology alone cannot be enough to propel people into prosperity. Without the right institutions, it can drive entire people, societies, lives, into instability, decline, penury. Institutions are the missing ingredient from the broken relationship between tech and prosperity.

So which institutions do we need?

Life, Inc the ultimate natural monopoly. So the first thing society should probably do is socialize it. Sure, pay the inventor a giant golden parachute. But it’s no more ethical, economic, or socially beneficial for a corporation, a person, or an institution to own the rights to great public goods, like Life, than it would be to sell off a society’s schools, prisons, hospitals, parks, or libraries, to the lowest bidder. Socialization might seem like a radical step. But it’s really the only solution for a natural monopoly this vast.

We don’t, and shouldn’t, socialize every natural monopoly under the sun. But we probably do have to counterbalance them with greatest investment in public goods. If we didn’t want to socialize Life, Inc, then we’d probably damn well better make education, training, transport, incomes, savings etc, for free — so young people had a shot.

Remember those young people? They sit around all day literally having the life sucked out of them. Jacked into IVs, their blood collected in giant reservoirs. They’re left, naturally enough, drained. That’s another form of a broken value equation. Just as Life Inc, creates little real value by taking too much from it’s consumers, old people, so it creates little real value by taking too much — too much human potential — from its producers, young people. For the truth is that thus drained, they’ll never be great doctors, artists, engineers, and so forth.

And yet, because it’s a natural monopoly, it only pays them minimum wage. So not only are they made exhausted and sick by their life-sucking jobs, they’re too poor to claw their ways out.

Remember the old people? They’re the flipside of that coin. They’ve given away everything they have to Life, Inc. Their homes, savings, and so on. Maybe Life, Inc says: we’ll lease your home back to you! But where are they going to find an income? They can’t donate blood like young people, and there aren’t many other jobs left. So where the hell are they going to live? What are they going to eat?

So, second, society is going to have to sharply up investment in public goods. Housing the elderly, safety nets, like insurance, training, and so on. At the end of this picture, society would have to create not just a basic income, which you probably have heard of, but basic assets, which you haven’t. Baskets of assets that are endowed to people at birth — assets like homes, savings, funds, and so on.

Or else. The stagnation resulting from Life, Inc, would simply roll on and on, like an endless tsunami. Because Life, Inc is really just a shadowy machine for me taking everything you have.

Even the most powerful technology in history — Life itself — wouldn’t be enough to prevent an economy from falling into penury. Entire generations of both old and young trapped not just in poverty, but in impoverishment — getting poorer, just by existing. Thus, it would ensure stagnation. Without an appropriate institutional response even the world’s greatest technology wouldn’t produce prosperity — but spiral into decline, fracture, and despair.

The Right Point of Technology is to Expand Human Potential.

What’s really going to waste in my example? It’s deeply counterintuitive, subtle, and that’s exactly why I chose this example.

Human potential itself. It’s being turned into shit. That’s what Shitnology really does.

How can that be, you probably think? After all, doesn’t Life, Inc, extend human life. Sure. But only by starving the young of opportunities, and cheating the old of security. So everyone loses. Some might live longer…but they’re not going to live better, trapped in a declining society and stagnant economy. They will be worse off, in every other way that counts. Is that worth it? Probably not to most reasonable people.

Remember me? I get beyond mega rich. I’m the only winner of this game — and I’m such a great winner that I end up owning everything.

But.

My gains are just your losses in disguise. That’s what economist call a “deadweight loss”. It’s the result of a poorly managed, designed, run economy. Resources that should be invested in things that matter are instead squandered, frittered away, wasted. When I gain, only by you losing, then the hidden, unseen cost is that a resource that could have been productively invested hasn’t been. Think about it. I take $20 from you. You’re not just out of $20. That $20 hasn’t gone to any productive use, right? From an economic perspective, it’s been wasted.

Life, Inc’s real economic result wouldn’t be a golden age of gleaming prosperity. It would be endless stagnation, depression, and decline. To counteract it, society would have to invest in public goods much, much more heavily. It would probably have to subsidize education, entrepreneurship, transport, infrastructure, healthcare. So that the opportunities missing from people’s lives started to return.

So the Big Lesson of my overly lengthy and involved example is this. Even the greatest technologies we can conceive of, greater than we can even invent, without the right institutions, can easily destroy human potential more than they expand, elevate, and enlarge it. They can become Shitnology. What are the “right” institutions? Those which are ethical, economic, and true: which do expand, elevate, enlarge human potential. Not just for some, but for all. Not just in this moment, but over lifetimes to come. Not just in illusory financial terms — but in real human ones.

Life, Inc, is an inevitability. Science tells us that something similar is pretty likely to happen. Hell, I’d bet there already are Blood Farms for the super rich, they’re probably just better hidden than the Holy Grail.

Maybe I’ll found it myself. If I don’t some other egomaniacal douchebag for whom changing the world is more like a inferiority complex driven jihad than a noble cause probably will. But the problem is that by itself, Life, Inc is likely to centralize wealth, reduce quality of life, amplify inequality, and prolong stagnation, or maybe even tip into full-on depression.

And that’s exactly what most of today’s technologies promise to do, too. That’s the net socioeconomic effect of robots, drones, apps, and so on. Unless we handle them with care, they’re going to become Shitnologies — mechanisms for the net destruction of human potential.

I’ll give you a simple example. You know that sleek self-driving on-demand car that you and the geeks are both dreaming about? It’s a revolutionary boon to humanity, right? Not so fast, John Galt. You’re reclining in the back seat, commuting to work. What are you doing? Well, you’re probably now spending an extra two hours a day working. After all, your position hasn’t really improved. You’re still barely holding to a job which barely pays your way into a barely surviving middle in a barely there economy. You’ve got to work ever harder, just to stand still. And so…you’re in the back of your future-mobile…and you don’t even see the goddamned world whizzing by like you used to. That was time you once used to have to yourself, with your family, for reflection…now it’s more time spent on pointless bullshit. A tiny but almost certain example of Shitnology.

So societies are going to have to respond to today’s wave of technologies in exactly the same three ways I’ve suggested they respond to Life, Inc. With more social support and safety nets, basic incomes and assets, less risk for people, limiting the reach of monopolies, and more investment in public goods.

The good news: now is the time to do it. Interest rates are going negative! Markets are screaming at countries to make those kinds of investments. It’s as if they’re wailing and moaning “you idiots!! take all this money that’s just lying around doing nothing and use it for something that matters!!”.

The bad news, of course, is that we have a generation of leaders that aren’t. So maybe, unless we like a world ruled by Shitnology, like the hypothetical Life, Inc, we’d better become them.

Umair
London
April 2016