Tech Pessimism

For a long time I was a futurist, and an optimist about technology in general. I agreed with the thesis that technology makes everything better over time. These days, I’m older and (maybe?) wiser, and I’ve become a lot more pessimistic about technology in general.

At the moment we’re living in the 6th mass extinction event, which is entirely the result of human activities. This fact is not something that’s up for debate, we have mountains of data which support this.

The thing about technology (and software in particular) is that it has had a tendency to lower costs and thereby increase the relative power of people who have traditionally received the short end of the stick in life. Or at least, it did for a while.

Today, however, I’m not really seeing technology improving peoples’ lives like it did 10 years ago. The Internet was an incredible creation, and what made it great was that no single entity such as a government or company controlled the whole thing. Now, however, the Internet is really just a delivery system for a handful of content arbitrators.

There’s lots of other great technology out there: take for example heat pumps, which are something I’m a bit obsessed with because of their incredibly valuable ability to move heat around.

However, once we start talking about heat pumps, I start to get more pessimistic. You can’t go to any discussion about them on the Internet without reading a bunch of false statements about how they “don’t work in cold weather” or whatever it might be. Another problem with heat pumps is that they aren’t cheap. They’re “cheap” in the sense that they’re no more expensive than an air conditioner, but in absolute terms it’s quite expensive to rip out a traditional fossil fuel based system and replace it with heat pumps. So what incentive is there for anyone to utilize this technology if it’s going to cost them a whole lot up front?

Plus, not to get too conspiracy theory or whatever, there is a huge industry that is strongly opposed to technology like heat pumps because it’s a threat to their bottom line. If you dig into the details of the “Inflation Reduction Act”, which is being advertised as “climate” legislation, you’ll notice that most of the “green” tax breaks aren’t available to most people because it caps out at levels that eliminate eligibility for the majority of homeowners who might want to install a heat pump (150% of median income, if you’re wondering). It’s almost as if it’s designed to fail, while simultaneously extending huge free money handouts to oil companies (which, let’s be honest, is the only reason the legislation ever passed).

So going back to the subject of technology: what is there to be excited about? When new, disruptive, relatively affordable technology comes along the incumbents (i.e., oil companies) will do everything in their power to wage a war of misinformation in order to prevent anyone from moving away from oil.

If technology could save us from annihilating ourselves from this planet (which, I do not believe it can), there would be just enough Senators (team red or blue makes no difference) willing to block any legislation that might accelerate the adoption of said technology because it would be bad for profits for companies selling fossil fuel products.

I’ve written about the subject of degrowth before. At this point, our option is intentional degrowth (call it a “soft landing”), or unintentional degrowth (“hard landing”), which will come about one way or another, and probably much Faster Than Expected™.

What gets me is not the gadgets, it’s the choke points around them. We keep building things that could help, then handing the rollout over to landlords, utilities, lobbyists, and the same political class that can’t stop shoveling money at fossil fuels.

There are still remarkable technological developments happening. For instance:

1. Renewable energy costs have plummeted dramatically—solar PV costs have fallen over 90% in the past decade.
2. Battery technology continues to improve, with energy density doubling roughly every decade.
3. Advances in material science are creating more efficient, durable, and sustainable products.
4. Satellite technology is connecting previously unreachable areas to the internet.
5. Medical technology has extended lifespans and improved quality of life for millions.

None of that means much if the stuff that actually matters gets kneecapped on the way in.

Heat pumps are a good example. The technology works. Modern cold-climate units work fine well below zero, despite the constant nonsense online. The real issue is that a homeowner has to eat the upfront cost, a landlord has no reason to care if the tenant pays the heating bill, and oil companies would love to keep it that way.

The Internet is its own depressing example. It used to feel like a place you went. Now it feels like five websites deciding what you’re allowed to see.

Instead of flattening power, it mostly gave the biggest platforms better tools to shape attention. The feeds are tuned to keep you scrolling, not to make you better informed or less insane.

So no, I don’t think the answer is to give up. I just don’t buy the lazy story that better tech automatically drags us somewhere better.

1. Local resilience matters: Building technology that works at community scales and enhances local resilience can bypass many of the systemic barriers to adoption.

2. Incentives over ideology: Rather than hoping corporations or governments will prioritize long-term thinking out of altruism, we need to design systems where their incentives align with sustainable outcomes.

3. Systems thinking: Technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum. We need to understand the economic, social, and political systems in which technologies operate and factor those into our solutions.

4. Appropriate technology: Not all solutions need to be high-tech. Sometimes simpler, more accessible technologies that people can understand, maintain, and repair themselves are more impactful.

5. Technological humility: We should remain skeptical of “tech will save us” narratives that promise easy solutions to complex problems, while still appreciating genuine progress.

I’m less interested in inventing some new label for that than in being honest about the bottleneck. We already know how to build a lot of useful things. The hard part is getting them adopted before incumbents, bad incentives, and political cowardice smother them.

Whether we pursue intentional degrowth or blunder into the other kind, I’d rather put my faith in technology that makes communities harder to break and less dependent on giant fragile systems.

If a piece of tech only works under perfect political conditions, with honest utilities, aligned incentives, and no lobbying pressure, then I don’t trust it to save us from anything.