Will the Machine Stop?

A rant on technology, Capitalism, and the future

A prescient work of science fiction.

Today, I reveal parts of my incessant internal monologue as I contemplate technology, late-stage Capitalism, and our collective future. I don’t claim to have the answers. I enjoy being challenged and, generally, would like to be proven wrong.

I recall when blockchain-enabled cryptocurrencies started to explode as a financial opportunity, seven or eight years ago. For a brief time, crypto promised a parallel financial system made of exciting speculative assets and shiny digital collectibles. Some people— early adaptors in my extended (Burning Man/tech) communities—suddenly became very rich.

There was a lot of idealistic and even prophetic rhetoric around blockchain and Web3 back then. While some of this rhetoric was Libertarian, some of it also focused on reducing wealth inequality, enhancing democratic participation and supporting ecologically regenerative practices. I still hope we might use blockchains to engineer a systemic redesign of our political and economic system along these lines. This hasn’t happened yet.

Before interest in blockchain exploded, back around 2012 - 2015, there was uncertainty about the future and growing awareness of the severe ecological threats. At least in the communities I was part of, crypto took over much of the space available for meaningful discussion of our planetary plight. The crypto boom unleashed yet another wave of amnesia about our existential threat. Many people saw a great opportunity: They could reap astounding financial gains while maintaining the rebellious stance of a system-breaker.¹

Now we have reached yet another threshold of uncertainty—one that is murkier, far more unsettling, than that last uncertainty crest. We all sense that the terrain of our society is shifting quickly. Fascism is on the rise. The ecological data is terrifying. With this piece, I hope to propose a bigger context for what is going on. Feel free to argue with me—rant, rave, cavil—in the comments.

Important bellwethers right now include Elon Musk’s seemingly unhinged Twitter rampage/midlife crisis. This has a number of implications and requires ongoing analysis. Luke Savage writes in Jacobin:

Thus far defined by impulsive decision-making, abrupt shifts in policy, and a transparently incoherent definition of free speech, Musk’s management style is bound together by the fifty-one-year-old’s embarrassing attempts at posting through the chaos. … there’s no great promethean genius, elaborate game of multidimensional chess, or modern day philosopher king hiding behind the Mars talk, product recalls, and epic bacon memes. All that exists behind the curtain is a garden-variety capitalist doing the kinds of things that capitalists have always done — in this case very badly.

Also there is Mark Zuckerberg’s startling failure to make the Metaverse remotely interesting to just about anyone. His failure has cost Meta / Facebook 75% of its market cap, falling from $1 trillion to $236 billion in one year, dropping his personal net worth an estimated $100 billion.

Another piece of the puzzle is the rapid decline of Amazon. This is anecdotal, but twice recently I ordered stuff from Amazon to my home in New York City, and both times the main items were lost or stolen before they reached me. This seems quite bizarre for a company that built a global reputation for its delivery service, eliminating thousands of local retail stores in the process. Amazon, it seems, currently struggles to perform its most basic function. (I’m curious if others have similar stories).

Post-Covid and with the effects of the Ukraine war, global supply lines are increasingly challenged. The UN warns of the potential for devastating food shortages as early as next year. Commentators from across the spectrum say we are entering a recession, an economic contraction, that could last for a long time—indefinitely, or even (if we face ever-intensifying resource constraints) permanently.

A vision of global expansion and infinite growth drove the success of Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, other “big tech” companies, as well as crypto. We may look back, soon, to realize this growth-fixation was an innate “system flaw” of late-stage Capitalism. The global economy requires incessant growth and innovation just to maintain itself. Otherwise, debts become unserviceable. The machine slows, and then stops.

Rosa Luxembourg understood: Capitalism is inherently unstable. For Capitalism to perpetuate itself, we must keep finding things outside of the market economy that we can assimilate, repackage, turn into new products and commodities. Hungry entrepreneurs hunt for the next big thing — the next huge payout. Until recently, this meant the speculative crypto market. Today, entrepreneurs also push to commodify psychedelic experience as a new growth industry.

In Double Blind, Alnoor Ladha and Rene Susa critique this ongoing effort to integrate psychedelics into Capitalism: “Baked into the current notion of the psychedelic renaissance is the sense that it already knows where it wants to go: more scale, more global distribution, more money, more people, more markets, more “social impact.” Psychedelics are the new Terra Nullius, new, uninhabited ground for the market to expand into and human ingenuity to uncover.” Hundreds of new companies pursue this overhyped field, even though psychedelics are still far from legal, and revenue models are mere projections.

Let’s step back to see this historically: People used to tell stories around the fire, take care of their own children in holistic (tribal) communities, grow and hunt their own food, and drink fresh water from local streams. Now they watch television or play video games, buy food from restaurants and supermarkets, send their kids to daycare, and buy bottled water if they can afford it. The more that people are separated from each other, silo’d in nuclear families or living alone, and removed from self-replenishing natural environments, the more that all of their personal needs must be satisfied via commercial exchanges. These are good for profit margins but bad for ecosystem health and integrity.

We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it.

— EM Forster, The Machine Stops

There is, finally, a limit to this kind of progress: A threshold beyond which it can’t continue and, therefore, must end.

One new Capitalist project seeks to outsource our immune systems to pharmaceutical companies via forced vaccinations. The easiest way to do this is to make vaccine passports required for travel, in the event of future (likely if not inevitable) pandemics. This extends the fatal logic of our system. It represents an unholy alliance between drug corporations, who are often bad actors, and global governing institutions. Our immune system is yet another thing that can be turned into a service, then sold back to us, unless we stop this.