Uncharted

Moreover, depending on technology incurs a high cost. Every time we use it, we outsource to machines what we could and can do ourselves. The more we use GPS, for example, the more the parts of our brain responsible for navigation and memory shrink.² And the less we know our neighbourhood. This is known as the automation paradox: the skills you automate, you lose. So the more we depend on machines to think for us, the less good we become at thinking for ourselves. The fewer decisions we make, the less good we become at making them. We risk falling into a trap: more need for certainty, more dependency on technology; less skill, more need. We become addicted to the very source of our anxiety.

Moreover, as Shoshana Zuboff has so eloquently diagnosed, the technological opportunity to nudge, tempt and even mandate behaviour is a wickedly clever way to enforce predictability. Enough carrots and sticks and there’s no need to anticipate behaviour that can be compelled. Knowing your car will be immobilised if you fail to pay its insurance extravagantly reduces uncertainty in decision-making. Technology aims to solve the so-called problem of human complexity by force-fitting a predetermined model onto the surprising variety of human existence. But absolute certainty about all aspects of life would be tyranny. At a time in our history where we have huge decisions to make – about the climate, about technology, capitalism, democracy – we need our freedom more than ever. It is in the interstices of uncertainty that we encounter the need and find the freedom to forge our identity and our future.

[...] Treating each other first as objects and then as groups, mediated by technological interfaces, just makes it cheaper, faster and easier to isolate and demonise one another. Relying on such systems means that we trade judgement for efficiency, reflection for obedience, inquiry for conformity and independence for constraint. Only organisations or individuals that are implicitly authoritarian would arrogate to themselves the right to tell people who they are and what they might become.

[...] As organisations grow, hierarchies and bureaucracy develop, measurement and rules drive standardisation and efficiency. As the work becomes atomised, it loses meaning and motivation is supplied by targets and rewards to keep the work on track. Such institutions have succeeded when uncertainty has been largely absent. But as they grow and complexity increases, their own hierarchies and bureaucracies overwhelm them. Eventually, the only way to function is by adopting shorter and shorter timeframes: quarterly returns or just-in-time production processes limit uncertainty. But the shorter the time frame, the smaller the aspiration, the more ephemeral the human rewards. Obsessive managerialism, with its measurable, predicted targets, overwhelms them, narrowing perspective and obscuring context and meaning.