"What matters most is how well you walk through the fire." — Bukowski
"I think human beings are programmable." — Zuckerberg, early Facebook days
“…it increasingly appears that humanity is the biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.” — Musk
Humanity is messy. And yet, the future is increasingly being shaped by people who reject that mess. Technologists who see our flaws not as something to understand, but something to fix, avoid, or escape.
We clean up reasonably well. But beneath the perfumes, suits and silks we're animals - sweaty, fluid-swapping creatures who sometimes abuse substances to alter their consciousness.
We dream, struggle, and suffer. We're curious. We love, make babies, make art and we come together and build cities.
Above all, we look in the mirror and accept that we're flawed. All the narratives we have about our human condition imply a fallen being, somehow broken. And many believed that it was our flawed souls that gave us the capacity to create great beauty and achieve wondrous feats.
Growing up
As a young kid, my heroes were personally acquainted with the flaws of our species and they loved humanity regardless.
Writers, philosophers, rockstars, actors, and artists: I admired them because they weren’t trying to escape their suffering. They explored it. The people I thought were cool struggled with addiction. Many died young. But to us, they were pioneers—testing the limits of social propriety and human consciousness.
Even the clean-cut ones had edge. MacGyver, the most straight-laced of them all, lived outside the system. He wouldn’t have survived in a traditional paradigm that caged him in. He didn’t drink or use drugs—but he was addicted to solving problems, chasing adrenaline, and helping people.
Dorothy Parker was a different kind of hero. Her wit cut through despair, and her capacity for love and suffering was endless. Her poem "Résumé" haunted me for years:
Résumé
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
Parker, MacGyver, Hemingway, Bukowski, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Woolf, Arendt… they made remarkable things by getting their hands dirty in the disappointments, contradictions, and absurdities of life.
This shift away from such figures—toward billionaires and engineers as cultural icons—didn’t happen by accident. It reflects a deeper transformation: where past generations tried to understand human nature, we now try to bypass it.
From Changing the World to Replacing It
To understand how we arrived at this point, it's worth tracing how our relationship with technology has fundamentally shifted. For most of human history, we used technology to enhance our capabilities while remaining grounded in physical reality.
Religion helped us get closer to the divine. We developed art to show us and explain to us the various aspects of our nature. We created sport for entertainment and to channel our aggression. And philosophy to try and explain the why of it all.
Then we had the enlightenment and we looked to science and our rational minds to explain our place in the cosmos.
It was this knowledge that gave us the technology to improve our quality of life, to the point where we could honestly say that as a species we populated and thrived in almost every corner on earth. Over centuries, we learned how to transform raw materials into shelter, sustenance, and flight. All these endeavours required thousands of people to cooperate and work together.
Something shifted over the past half-century. Instead of using technology to better navigate the messy human world, we began building alternative worlds entirely.
And as we became more sophisticated with what we could do online, we digitised the world around us. Everything from cash to letters to newspapers, magazines and corporate meetings were and still are being swallowed into our screens. And with the advent of AI, many of our jobs are also likely to be digitised and removed from the real world.
At the same time, money also flowed into advancements in medicine and space travel, where we now face a future where we’ll be able to colonise other planets and to live almost indefinitely.
The Subtext of These Advances
While these developments seem like progress they share a troubling theme: to solve human problems we need to erase what makes us human.
The premise of social media was that we could stay connected and build relationships with people online. But real connection needs shared time, space, friction. That didn’t scale—so algorithms replaced intimacy with attention. And what we started calling ‘distraction’ was subtly renamed ‘engagement’.
This mindset reaches its logical extreme in the work of futurists like Ray Kurzweil, whose vision of 'the Singularity' perfectly encapsulates the technocratic escape fantasy. According to Kurzweil, the computer scientist and futurist, the Singularity is:
"The Singularity... will occur when we merge our brain with the cloud. Think of it like having your phone in your brain... The answer will just appear."
Others want to extend their lives indefinitely. They want to leverage science to optimise every aspect of their lifestyles to prevent their bodies from deteriorating with age. These people have removed all vices from their lives and spend millions of dollars trying out a cocktail of drugs and are also looking to nanorobotics to reverse the aging process. And at the extreme end of this spectrum we have those that want us to transcend our bodily limitations all together by creating the capability to upload our consciousnesses and thereby potentially live forever in a virtual, digital realm.
These people aren’t trying to live well. They’re trying not to die.
While others hold up a vision of humans populating Mars or creating space colonies. There are a handful of billionaires who've stated that we need to become an interstellar species in order to survive, because this one planet we've been given won't sustain all of us, especially if we don't change consuming natural resources and paying the planet back with waste and pollution.
What unites all these visions—whether it's digital immortality, Martian colonies, or brain-computer fusion—is a fundamental rejection of what previous generations saw as the source of human creativity and meaning: our limitations, our mortality, our need for each other.
We Need to Wake Up
The people whom we look up to today are not humanists. They are socially stunted individuals who made their fortunes by using technology to accumulate as much wealth as possible and then using it to subvert the human condition by rejecting what it means to have to live with other people.
It is time we woke up to the fact that these aren't people to be followed or admired; instead, they're humans who want to escape social discomfort and the messiness of reality. These people are trying to show us what the future should look like, and how we should behave and live in that future. And everything they describe is a dystopian hellscape from which they've sterilised every aspect of what it means to be human.
These people hate being challenged, they hate compromise and they struggle with the messiness of having to negotiate with others. They're eerily similar to spoilt children who struggle to share.
These technocrats use their intellect to insulate themselves from the contradictions and the challenges of the world and aim to start a new society based on their needs, their version of what the experience of life should be like. And we've made them wealthy enough to try and build these social alternatives.
What they don't tell us is that people like you and me won't be welcome.
As they formulate their plans, they aren't thinking of us. These people see you and me as something they need to be protected against. We're the glitch their visions will troubleshoot. And, if their current track records are anything to go by, they will siphon resources from everyday people to fund and support their visions. They will manipulate taxation and undo regulation to transfer wealth from us to enrich the handful of people whom they deem to be worthy of saving.
Their Current Track Record
The harm these technocrats have inflicted on the common person, be it through their social media platforms, their actions while advising government departments, or through their digital marketplaces, is unquestionable. They are responsible for retailers going out of business, for children and young people experiencing significant psychological harm and for many people being unable to provide for their families. A report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance suggests a correlation between Amazon’s significant expansion and the decline of small retailers in the US. The report states that between 2007 and 2017 the number of small retailers in the U.S. fell by 65,000.
Their businesses aren't there to enrich or improve our lives, but rather, these are income streams intended to fund their vision of what society and humanity should be like. A place where they are royalty, where they can expect servitude, sterility and adulation.
So how do we reclaim agency in a world increasingly designed by people who see humanity as a problem to be solved rather than a condition to be honoured? The answer isn't to abandon technology entirely, but to engage with it on our own terms.
Taking Back Control
I suspect that most of us instinctively dislike people like Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos and Altman. We intuit that they don't respect or care much for average people. And I think that when we hear them speak, or watch them being interviewed, there are elements of their character that make us feel uncomfortable and untrusting.
We should listen to our gut reactions. We should remember who the people are behind Facebook, Instagram, ChatGPT, Amazon, X etc. We can't continue to disassociate the people who provide us with these products from the products themselves. The people who built and manage these platforms see us as a cross between commodities and inconveniences. We are a means to an end. Nothing more.
I am not suggesting abandoning what they offer us. What I propose is that we become aware of the intent behind these products. The people who profit from addictive platforms are there to take from us, usually it's our time, our attention and our money. We must find a way to engage with these technologies on our own terms, so that they serve us. And the only way to do this, is to take back our time, our attention, and to focus our minds on the world around us. Start small, 30 minutes a day of not engaging with a screen. Do this consciously. Go for a walk without listening to a podcast or music. Sit down and have a coffee and watch the people around you. Find a space in your life where you are all of you and not only a distracted version of you.
I recently discovered that John Birmingham, a writer whose work I admire, has a 'screen-free' room in his house. I love that. A friend and I are planning on starting a screen-free club – a 3rd space where people can come together and do anything other than engage with screens. I'm hoping this starts a trend which sees us wrestling technology out of more public spaces.
Let's stop mistaking technocratic escape plans for vision. Let's build futures that honour the parts of life that can't be optimised — only lived.
My screen free place is always the kitchen, and anywhere outdoors. Favorite Bukowski quote.