Technorealists, the silent majority?

Centrism is most widely understood to be a political stance between two extremes a left-to-right polarity. It can serve a useful role, especally in multi-party systems where the centrists represent a spectrum of real political platforms rather than the inneffectual bothsidesing it amounts to in the binary system of the USA.

It's an especially aggravating stance when the two extremes aren't so much political as they are existential. On the one hand we've got a global elite of business-as-usual conglomerates hellbent on growing for growth's sake until something pops so bad it'll ring our ears for generations to come.

Meanwhile the global majority agrees we desperately need systems change, but we're still figuring out exactly what that ought to look like and how we can possibly wrest enough power away from the CEO-class to implement said changes.

Cue the centrist coming in to say both sides are taking it too far and the status-quo is not that bad actually, it just needs a few incremental tweaks, from fascism to not-quite-so-much fascism.

There's no left or right to quibble about here. There are 3500 prison owners and 8.3 billion of us living inside their walls1.

Social media hates a centrist

Western social media in particular has been shaped in the mold of US two-party politics, so the centrist position is tantamount to "voting independent", which is how you draw the ire of 99% of the population instead of just the "opposing" other half.

In the painfully limiting context of American political discourse this aversion to the middle ground is appropriate, but applied generally it's dysfunctional. Cars have their uses, and so do bikes. Most people share the centrist position that both modes of transport serve a legitimate purpose.

But social media thrives on extremes. That's where outrage happens, driving clicks and impressions. You'll never hear from the people in the middle because their opinions are boringly sensible and uncontroversial.

Spiritually centered

Many wisdom traditions consider centrism - that is, to be mindfully centered - nothing less than the path to enlightenment.

The Middle Way refers to a spiritual practice that steers clear of both extreme asceticism and sensual indulgence.

The second formulation, "teaching the Dharma by the middle," refers to how the Buddha's Dharma (Teaching) approaches ontological issues of existence and personal identity by avoiding eternalism (or absolutism) and annihilationism (or nihilism).

Our collective failure to live these teachings hit me flat in the face every day as I open my social feed and do my best to mentally filter out the incessant arguing between technological boosters and doomers.

Neither group will readily agree with that derogatory labeling, but they have nonetheless picked a tribal side in what their social media feed of outrage porn paints as a simple binary. Everything they hear about "the other side" is the most extreme example.

"There's no such thing as a good data center" vs "If you like the internet you have to like data centers"

"AI isn't good for anything" vs "AI is the best thing ever and it's gonna be 10x better by next year"

"All money is rooted in evil" vs "Capitalism is the only practical coordination-mechanism we've got; there is no alternative."

None of this is representative of common sense in the wider populace; the common ground that's invariably surfaced by having a good-faith conversation for more than 10 minutes. Once you get past the rapid-fire soundbites into "oh sure, if you put it (sensibly, boringly) like that"-territory, the middle way prevails more often than not.

Common sense majority

Most people don't actually hate data centers as a whole, they just object to them being built everywhere all at once against the popular will of directly affected locals.

Most people don't want to take your coding agent away, they just want their google searches to return actual websites again.

Most people understand the value of businesses, but they're fed up with the repeated overreach of big business that have long since stopped playing by the rules all the rest of us are bound by.

Yes, AI has an increasing number of legitimate uses, especially and unsurprisingly in the STEM field from which it originated. And yes, AI is the product of a dominator culture that has yet to properly reckon with its anti-social origins and internal programming premised on extraction. Both are true, and neither can be properly understood in denial of the other.

The extent to which our latest technological innovation works isn't the real point of contention. What the critics worry about is a naive adherence to technological advancement in a time when technology is chiefly wielded by an undemocratic, unelected minority of god-kings whose grand vision for this technology is to make themselves so powerful as to become ungovernable.

You might be a technorealist

I first drafted this article thinking what I was talking about would be called 'technological centrism', but apparently the term technocentrism has already been coined to mean something more akin to techno-solutionism.

Turns out the term I was reaching for is technorealism, introduced in the 90s by technosocial luminaries like Douglass Rushkoff, admittedly one of my most beloved living influences.

Technorealism is an attempt to expand the middle ground between techno-utopianism and Neo-Luddism by assessing the social and political implications of technologies so that people might all have more control over the shape of their future.

[the goal was] not to promote or dismiss technology but to understand it so the application could be aligned with basic human values. Technorealism suggests that a technology, however revolutionary it may seem, remains a continuation of similar revolutions throughout human history.

The technorealist manifesto hasn't survived the unrelenting entropy of link rot, but you can read the whole thing here:

Its central argument reads as if it was written yesterday.

In this heady age of rapid technological change, we all struggle to maintain our bearings. The developments that unfold each day in communications and computing can be thrilling and disorienting. One understandable reaction is to wonder: Are these changes good or bad? Should we welcome or fear them?

The answer is both. Technology is making life more convenient and enjoyable, and many of us healthier, wealthier, and wiser. But it is also affecting work, family, and the economy in unpredictable ways, introducing new forms of tension and distraction, and posing new threats to the cohesion of our physical communities.

That was 30 years ago, talking about the unstoppable march of a mystifying new technology called the internet.

It was always just a matter of time until the sum of all human knowledge would be put onto a supercomputer and become a pseudo-sentient library of everything. But there was nothing inevitable about who would own, direct and benefit the most from the internet's societal disruption, nor who it would externalize its harms to.

Perhaps with hindsight we can say it was only ever gonna go the way of the internet oligarchy we're now beset with, but that same hindsight can bestow upon us a clearsightedness we lacked in the last millennium. We played the tape and now we're living the world that inaction between fictitious opposites leads to.

There's another way to go about this. Not to the left nor the right, but a middle way in between; a way of expanding the middle ground so as to see ourselves where most of us are actually standing: in the unremarkable center.

More of this metaphor in JD's Traditional Social Media as a Prison.