One Device to Rule Them All
The FIAT: Shadow of the Fourth Industrial Age Technologies
The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it. – Mark Weiser, 1991
When Sauron forged the One Ring in the red fires of Mount Doom, it gave him the power to control all the other magic rings of the world—and with it the races and peoples of Middle-earth.
Here, on planet Earth, we have no magic rings and no Mount Doom, but we have devices forged in Silicon Valley, which connect us to a digital network whose wires and signals ring the globe. We have no Sauron, but we have corporate and political tech lords whose power over this ring—and our personal lives—grows ever stronger.
To appreciate the potential future power of this ring, and how we might protect ourselves and our families, it will help to consider just how far the forces of the shadow have progressed.
Most of us are well aware of the mesmerizing pull of our personal devices: the screens we gaze into, the media we read, the simulated realities we lose ourselves in. We know we are taken captive, and yet, strangely, we do not behave like captives.
Part of the problem is that our devices can be useful for certain tasks. But the other part, the greater part, is that we have become comfortable in our captivity, even dependent and addicted.
The most demonic thing that can happen to a human being is to become completely self-absorbed, and to believe it is good and lifegiving. In an ancient Greek myth, a beautiful young man gazes into a pool, and seeing his own reflection, falls helplessly in love with himself and cannot pull himself away. In the end he dies and becomes the narcissus flower.
A flower is a small consolation for dying in a state of deluded self-focus. The digital equivalent is to gaze too long into stimulating screens or to immerse ourselves too deeply in virtual realities. Our consolation, in this case, is not that we become flowers, but that we believe ourselves to be mentally and emotionally empowered, even as our actual minds become atrophied and distorted.
We cannot underestimate the depth of this digital invasion, which reaches toward the sanctuary of our spirit.
Meanwhile, there is a danger from the outside. We do not wear the ring of technology alone but in a society of people who are attached to their devices. These devices are connected to online platforms that algorithmically groom our activities to maximize profits, but they also shape and increasingly censor our opinions on everything from politics to pandemics, from climate change to sex change.
If the first level of our mind’s captivity is self-stimulating immersion, then the second level holds us captive to social and political messaging. The double nature of this imprisonment is highly effective. The first prison cell softens the mind; the second conforms it to propaganda.
The Nazis and Soviet Communists were brutal experts at mass population control, but they would have envied the tech lords of today, who can shape social perceptions swiftly and globally, and usually without physical violence against those who oppose them—only denial and stigmatization, if need be.
Most of us are aware of these manipulations, but we have difficulty fighting back. It is a war of attrition, waged against our attention span and an already weakened mind. We cannot hope to win, bound as we are to our magic rings.
The FIAT: Where the shadow lies
Our first thought might be, Take off the magic rings. Limit our device use, delete a handful of apps, take more walks in nature. Adjusting our habits is wise, but we must come to grips with the scope of the challenge.
In Stolen Focus, author Johann Hari explores the reasons behind our difficulties paying attention and why we have developed an “attention pathogenic culture”. After reviewing the scientific literature and speaking with over 250 experts from around the world, Hari warns,
I found strong evidence that our collapsing ability to pay attention is not primarily a personal failing on my part, or your part, or your kid’s part. This is being done to us all. It is being done by very powerful forces. Those forces include Big Tech, but they also go way beyond them. This is a systemic problem. The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world’s attention burns…
Hari’s insight can bring on a sense of resignation. But, as bad as it sounds, the problem is greater than Hari suggests. Our attention and our minds are not the only target of “the system”.
We are in the midst of a fourth industrial revolution, which threatens to transform every sphere of life. The first revolution was steam power; the second was electric power; the third was computers and the internet. The fourth moves toward a convergence and blurring of the digital, biological, and physical spheres. The technologies include big data, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, humanoid robots, genetics, biotech, and more.
The current technologies will seem quaint and old-fashioned compared to what is coming. The handheld and lap devices that since the mid-2000s have seized and scattered our attention, and deftly maneuvered our opinions, can be powered off and set aside for a time, if we have the discipline.
The fourth industrial age technologies—we can call them the FIAT—run the risk of becoming civilization’s One Ring. Although still emerging, there is no aspect of life the new technologies will not touch and transform: money, industry, education, medicine, agriculture, travel, cities, government.
And fiat it will be: a decree. Let it be done! The optimism will be thick, the criticism will be thin, and the primary motivations, as in every past industrial revolution, will be an increased concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small minority. But that may not be the worst of it.
Back in 1991, Mark Weiser recognized that the most profound technologies become so embedded in our ways of living as to disappear. But with the advent of the fiat, it is not simply that the fabric of daily life becomes indistinguishable from technology. It is that we ourselves become indistinguishable from it: integrated, grafted, machined into the Machine. It is we who might disappear.
The threat of this possibility is creeping toward us. If the first level of our captivity beguiled us with personal devices, and the next one conformed us by monitoring and targeting our minds, the final one could well transform us into a shriveled citizenry of techno-Gollums, clinging to our magic rings with the conviction that we are beautiful lords of power, when all we have become are sickly, withered shadows of humanity.
If we are to avoid a potential technoprogressive nightmare and resist the machining of our minds and our children’s minds, an alternative vision and way of living will be needed for ourselves and our families, within a wider community or network of people.
Not every community will end up looking the same, but here is a common starting point to consider, a place we can all begin: understanding the mind of the Machine.
Understanding it, we will see the real challenge for what it is: a spiritual battle.
There is no official spirituality associated with the fiat system, but one is emerging. Three of its most important doctrines are apocalypse, transformation, and virtualism.
The first doctrine: Apocalypse
The apocalyptic element of the faith is a narrative of crisis that terrible threats and disasters are about to overwhelm us. The danger may be global warming or pandemic or food insecurity, or even social or political issues. Anything sufficiently unsettling will suffice.
The problem is not with the threats, which are typically genuine challenges, but with the narrative, which is crafted to maintain an atmosphere of urgency and stress. In a previous essay I explored how narratives of fear, when spread through the mass media, ensnare our attention and constrict its focus to the feared object. They mobilize our energies to battle the feared object and make us zealously intolerant of anybody who questions the narrative.
As a mass narrative, the apocalyptic stories of the fiat are essential. They provide a justification for saving us from an existential threat through either (a) new technologies, or (b) authoritarian political solutions, with little public consultation or democratic input.
Strategy (b) is obviously not a new technology, but it serves the fiat system by promoting the centralization of power, and by causing rapid upheaval in social and political traditions, leaving us more vulnerable to the imposition of the fiat’s new values.
While promising rescue, apocalyptic narratives tend to vigorously deny alternative solutions to problems and attack critics through shaming or suppression. Important questions never get answered, or not in ways that keep them in the public eye, such as:
- What individuals and interests will financially gain from the apocalyptic narrative?
- What groups will suffer fewer rights and freedoms?
- In the case of new technologies, what are the side effects on physical health and mental functioning?
- What media companies and platforms receive financial support for affirming the apocalyptic narrative? Who is providing that money?
An apocalyptic narrative keeps the cortisol flowing through the veins of society. A mood of chronic fear and crisis blocks our ability to think clearly, or to look away from the narrative long enough to doubt it.
Healthy doubt is the doorway to questions and debate. Without it, we are doomed to compliance.
The second doctrine: Transformation
Transformation is another of the central tenets of the new faith: the changing of one thing into another, elevating it to a supposedly higher or more desired form.
Jesus turned water into wine, but he never turned a man into a machine. Such is the power and ambition of the new age: to integrate technology ever more finely into the fabric of life, or else to use tech to snip threads from one part of the fabric and weave them into another.
If the third industrial revolution gave rise to digital devices that conformed our minds through manipulated messaging, then the fourth will conform the physical objects of society, from cities to products to bodies, into the desired image of its tech lords.
Behind this is a religious attitude that we are like gods, and the dust of creation is ours to scoop up and shape according to our wishes. Things must not be seen as unique and inviolable, but as raw material that can be ground down to one bland essence, like a mono-cultural plastic for a global 3D printer.
The tenet of transformation comes with great optimism and a pretense of virtue: the terrifying threats of the apocalyptic narrative will be averted, and everything is being done for our own good.
But this turns out to be little more than predatory altruism, playing on our best instincts to achieve the goal of a total fiat system and, ultimately, the hybridization of humans with technology.
As Klaus-Gerd Giesen puts it, trans-humanizing tech is “often bathed in the glow of a genuinely humanist medical” intention, such as saving lives and alleviating suffering—like a microchip implant to improve the memory of people with Alzheimer’s disease. But the true purpose is to convince us that a holy communion between humans and tech is “uncontroversial, inevitable, and, above all, eminently desirable”.
We are warned that to resist this goal is to risk being left behind. Natural humans—the ones God made—will soon become obsolete, and the only hope is to put our trust in the new gods and their miraculous powers.
Nobody claims to be a god yet—the fiat lords are not yet so overtly religious—but to criticize the doctrine of transformation is to invite the wrath of one. The Covid-19 pandemic brought with it the mass excommunication of many who resisted the new vaccine technologies, through shaming, job loss, exclusion, and the loss of democratic rights and freedoms.
As other new advances of the fiat meet resistance, there will be more stigma and more punishments. It can be no other way. Every religion must have its demons.
The third doctrine: Virtualism
A third and related element of the new faith is virtualism. The word “virtual” is most associated with immersive platforms for video gamers and adulterous avatars, but, increasingly, it expresses the attitude and spirit of our age.
David Chalmers, one of the foremost philosophers in the world, suggests that we need to think of virtual reality as genuine reality. In Chalmers’ view, virtual reality is not an illusion or fiction. We can live just as meaningful a life in virtual reality as in reality itself.
Chalmers even suggests that ordinary reality might be a simulation. This idea was first described by Nick Bostrom in 2003, and has been circulating in the popular culture for even longer, notably beginning with The Matrix films. But its uptake by Chalmers and others signals a growing intellectual seriousness about the idea.
If reality is a simulation, then spiritual implications must follow. Tech commentator Jason Kehe writes:
The paradox of Chalmers’ “simulation realism,” in fact, is that, once you embrace it, there does not follow from it some corollary disenchanting of reality. On the contrary, so many isms that in modern times have been dismissed as mystical, supernatural—dualism, panpsychism, animism—here find themselves reenchanted, imbued with a profound new vitality. We and everything around us become not less real but, in a way, more real, animated panpsychically by forces both here and, dualistically, there, somewhere else, somewhere, let’s say, above.
This line of thinking extends, as you might have already guessed, to the ultimate ism of all, theism, the belief in a creator, and isn’t that all simulation theory, in the final analysis, really is? Religion by a new, technological name?
Kehe is proposing, almost to his own surprise, an act of faith. If we embrace the doctrine that the virtual is real—if we accept the altar call and make the leap—we will be graced with a deep new energy and a fresh awareness of the supernatural.
Reality, Kehe suggests, might be “simulations all the way down”. We create digital simulations for our devices, yet we ourselves may be a quantum-pixelated projection of a “supercomputer” that exists outside of our universe—or even the creation of “a precocious teenage simulator-god” who is toying with humanity. Either way, the result is the same: The virtual is real, and the real virtual.
The idea a creative power outside the universe may be projecting the universe into being is curiously close to the Judeo-Christian view of reality, in which God brings the world into being out of a dark, formless void, and even makes people—male and female—“in his own image”—a seeming simulation.
But God is not a supercomputer or prankish teenager, and does not use computer code but an unhackable phenomenon called the Word or Logos.
Such observations will be of little importance to the believers of virtualism, except as a historical footnote. The fiat system does not want old religion; it wants new religion as technology.
A rational thesis that we are all in a dream
If there is a true equivalence between the virtual and real, then appearances and realities have the same status, the same significance. True reality becomes devalued as a result.
It is like flooding the gold market with pyrite but treating it as gold. The worth of actual things diminishes. Moral and ethical judgments get fuzzy.
Robot children that can read human emotions are being designed to be the companions of people with dementia and autism. One day such bots may be so commonplace that their owners will demand legal rights and protections for them, much as software engineer Blake Lemoine requested for LaMDA, the language-AI that runs Google’s chatbot (actually Lemoine claims that the AI itself asked for an attorney).
Even the skeptical of us may find it hard to resist a feeling of compassion for an AI machine cutely bundled in silicone skin. Why should the imitation of a thing matter less than the real thing, if its resemblance fulfills our desires?
And the opposite is also true. Just as virtual realities can elicit our compassion for unreal things, they can degrade our compassion for real things.
If something is only a simulation, why treat it with any respect? Virtual platforms are already festering with abusive behavior and pornography. In one study of the Facebook Metaverse platform, users including minors were exposed to sexual content, threats of violence, and grooming every seven minutes.
The doctrine of virtualism confuses our moral sense by inviting us to give value to things that do not deserve it, and to devalue things that do, based on how we feel. There can be no corrective feedback from the “real” world because, if virtualism is true, there is no difference between the real and the virtual.
In a way, we will have returned to our initial level of captivity: an excessive focus on self-stimulation and self-affirmation. We are kneeling again before the pool of Narcissus, mesmerized by a reflection, except the technology behind this reflection is far more powerful than the flat screens on our little devices.
At the same time, as we indulge in the virtual dream, tech companies can monitor our behavior, for instance through VR headsets which detect eye movement, facial expressions, body movement, and body temperature. This data can be manipulated for profit, in what has been called surveillance capitalism on crack.
In the near future our virtual data may be used to conform our values and behavior as well—a social credit system on crack.
To accept the idea that a simulation can be as meaningful as reality, even spiritual, is to open ourselves up to profound manipulation. But some will believe it, and that will bring further division to our already fractured society. How long before we arrive at the day G.K. Chesterton foresaw, unless we are already there?
It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.
This is our Rivendell moment
We are fighting a spiritual battle. The battle is spiritual not because it is supernatural, though it includes the supernatural, but because it encompasses all that is real. We are fighting for the mystical sanity that we are awake and the green leaves are not a dream.
There has always been disagreement on what the real is. It is why we have philosophers and artists. But we have never had a situation in which a creed of unreality may become the default narrative for an entire society.
The faith of the tech lords is capturing and weakening our minds; conforming us to values and ways of life that we may not want; misting the air with fear; turning the bedrock underneath us to sand. And the lords are making billions.
This is our Rivendell moment. The fiat system has not fully emerged, and the faith underlying it has not fully pixelated our collective imagination. The Digital Sauron does not yet have the Ring.
If we want to resist becoming slaves to the fiat system, the first step, as I have suggested, is to clearly understand the spiritual tenets of that system: apocalypse, transformation, and virtualism.
In practical terms, it will be helpful to:
- Train our minds, and the minds of our children and youth, to recognize, label, and reject these tenets.
- Learn to spot and reject predatory altruism, which sets traps for gentle and empathic souls.
- Bracket our wonderment at individual technologies—which might have practical benefit for isolated tasks—and see, instead, the larger dehumanizing impact of the overall fiat.
- Recognize we each have a pool of Narcissus inside us: a virtual place where we immerse ourselves too deeply. Well-honed habits and disciplines are needed to pull away from the pool. If we can’t do it, our children will not be able to either.
The folly of willpower
The suggestions above, although useful at a practical level, have one thing in common: they are reactions to the fiat. Any long-term approach to surviving the coming challenges cannot be based primarily on a reactionary model of life. Another model is needed, one with intrinsic momentum and its own center.
There is also a further limitation with the suggestions. Some, like Johann Hari, might reasonably wonder if “fiddling” with our individual choices and habits has any hope of succeeding against a global system.
It is a valid question. In the case of our weakened attention spans—which is the focus of Hari’s book—he even calls such efforts “cruel optimism”, which play straight into the hands of Big Tech:
They can no longer deny the crisis, so they are doing something else: subtly urging us to see it as an individual problem that has to be solved with greater self-restraint on my part and yours, not theirs. That’s why they began to offer tools they argued would help you to strengthen your willpower. All new iPhones have an option where you can be told how much Screen Time you have spent that day and that week, and a Do Not Disturb function where you can block out incoming messages. Facebook and Instagram introduced their own modest equivalents…
Hari’s sobering observation applies equally to how the fiat system might impact our lives beyond merely our attention spans. There are two points, actually. The first is that our resistance to the fiat is more likely to end in defeat when our strategies are practiced in an isolated manner: me and you doing our own thing, in a haphazard, disconnected way.
The second is that the fiat system will deploy its predatory altruism to sympathize with our difficulties and offer techno-solutions for our failing attention spans, or whatever our problem happens to be, when in fact more rings of power will only entrench our captivity.
At the very least, all this suggests that people need to work in networks and communities, coordinating their approaches and patterns of living on a broader scale, carving out resilient local niches beyond the direct reach of the system.
Some of this will arise organically, such as through homeschool networks or likeminded groups, but some might be strategically planned. The tech lords have their elite council meetings—their Davoses. Each of us needs a Rivendell.
The warrior gardener
When the Council of Rivendell met in Middle-earth, they decided the only way to defeat the enemy was to destroy the One Ring.
Here on Earth, ours is not a quest to destroy anything, but a struggle to stay human, care for our families, and to grow. For this, we need shovels not swords. We need to plant our seeds—knowledge, skills, resources, connections—in every patch of good soil we can find. If this is a spiritual battle with a Digital Sauron, then we are mainly warrior gardeners, tilling, tending, and praying for good fruit.
That might sound unheroic, even illogical. It might seem, instead, that like Frodo we need to find a way to Mount Doom to cast the ring into the fire—or else like the weary Elves, to escape across the sea, far from the spreading darkness.
A better image is that we are like Sam Gamgee, a good servant to his master, and a gardener. If we must abandon our cabbages and potatoes in order to go to Mordor, we do it not for victory, but out of faithfulness to our friend and all that we love.
And if we are especially blessed, we survive and come back, have a family, and tend a garden.
Image Credit: Pau Llopart Cervello