A dystopian fusion of human and machine is being pushed on us by a big tech elite. Michael D.B. Harvey, author of The Age of Humachines: Big Tech and the Battle for Humanity’s Future, warns of the ‘humachinator’ worldview that weds unrestrained technology and capitalism - and what we might do to reclaim a future rooted in democracy and ecological balance. Highlights include:
How the ‘humachine’ blurs the line between human and machine, technologizing everything and everyone;
How the history of scientism and empiricism has led humachinators to imagine the brain as a computer and the body as a machine and the belief that engineering can control humanity, biophysical laws, and even death itself;
How big tech oligarchs merge unfettered science with unfettered capitalism to produce ‘ultrascience’;
Why big tech oligarchs’ faith in unrestrained technology and markets has merged into ‘ontocapitalism’ - a form of capitalism that commodifies nature and all human experience;
How humachinators use ‘tricknology’ to hype their technologies and get us, especially the young, addicted to their products;
What the five types of humachination are: cognitive, emotional, relational, the mechanized human, and a totalizing daily environment where our lives are surveilled, interpreted, and mediated by machines;
How the extreme individualism in Silicon Valley undermines democracy and collective decision-making;
How the ‘G’ word, growth, is behind all the humachinators’ actions and dreams;
Why our relationship with technology is ultimately political, not inevitable, and that we need to resist big tech oligarchs who profit most from unrestricted technology;
Why we need to move from CIMENT values (competitiveness, individualism, materialism, elitism, nationalism, and technologism) to CANDID values (cooperative, altruistic, non-materialist, democratic, internationalist, and deferential to nature) - and how we might shift those values.
Transcript here: https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/michael-db-harvey