Desire Comes First

The tech-free life is not enough to defeat the Machine

Photo by Nik on Unsplash

It is a rather commonly held belief that modern technologies, especially digital ones which possess a screen, are the sum total of what Paul Kingsnorth and other techno-dissenters call the Machine. According to this belief’s adherents, smartphones, tablets, cars, and, for some, even washing machines (R.S. Thomas once preached a sermon raging against these devilish white goods) are the foes upon whom all of our attacks are to be concentrated if we are to defeat the Machine, rescue our humanness, and prevent the good life from being eroded away like a cliff on the verge of collapse.

Though well-intentioned, this understanding of the Machine misses the mark entirely. In fact, I believe it is a gross misconception and one which may prove to be fatal in the long-drawn battle against the Machine. When an army is fixated on attacking the decoy to the east whilst ignoring the approaching battalion advancing to the west, they are in mortal danger irrespective of whether they destroy the decoy. Likewise, those who insist we expend all our efforts on fighting problematic modern technologies without considering what it is that powers, harnesses, and creates these technologies in the first place put themselves and those they are fighting to protect in a state of peril similar to those ignorant army officers.

This state is perilous because the sum total of the Machine is not modern technologies; rather it is the sum total of our fallen desires for absolute control, hyper-efficiency, and raw power. The true essence and identity of the Machine — and thus the real danger — is found inside each of our chests: the fallen, warped, and selfish desires we all possess and, if we are honest, strive to satisfy on a daily basis. It is these foes which we should be aiming to mortify with every ounce of our being; it is the heads of our own desires which should receive the full weight of our strongest attacks.

One cannot stress it strongly enough that modern technologies are merely the means by which many of these fallen, machine-like desires are expressed and satisfied. They are the lesser enemy. A smartphone coupled with social media apps can temporarily satisfy our desires for instant gratification and is designed to exacerbate them (which is why we find them so insidious), but it cannot manufacture these desires within us in the first place. Intrusive surveillance technologies provide immense power for control to nefarious state actors, but without the desire to use and manipulate the data, the data remain just numbers or pixels. One-click ordering may frictionlessly satisfy our consumeristic wants, but the one who is content with what they have isn’t going to press the button.

You see, the desire must come first. Without it, modern technologies are powerless — and may never have been made in the first place. The AI model will not be written, the data centre will not be built, and the bulldozer will sit stationary in front of the forest without the fuel that desire provides. Thus, if we neglect fighting our fighting our fallen desires we will fail to tackle the problem at its source. Our fallen desires will keep on destroying and degrading what is good in this world with or without technology’s help; lest we forget they were able to do so for millennia before the digital and industrial revolutions ever arrived on the scene.

At this stage, some may raise the emergent issue of autonomous technologies. Don’t they by-pass human desire and thus represent a novel threat which requires a new front to be opened up in our battle against the Machine? It is true that these technologies — especially autonomous and self-replicating AI — present an extreme danger enough to cause sleepless nights for ministers and security officials the world over and I do believe they need to be nipped in the bud before they can cause carnage. But still, the desire to create these supposedly autonomous technologies must have come first; so too the desire to unleash them once they have been made. So, again, rather than just fighting autonomous technologies, it is the desires that are behind them that we need to wage war against the most vigorously. Remember, generative and self-replicating AI did not create itself. We did that. There truly is nothing new under the sun.

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If there is one thing you take away from this essay, then let it be this: if we only fight technology (and, for that matter, technics) without fighting our own fallen desires and without striving for reformation in the morals and virtues of our societies, then we are just playing an endless game of whack-a-mole. We will defeat or legislate against one technology whilst failing to notice the roll out of ten far worse technologies developed under our nose by those developers whose desires for control, greed, and addiction remain unabated and who are serving customers who still crave what these technologies can do. What is more, even if we do defeat the technologists and their technologies, we will find these Machine vices — addiction, greed, violence, selfishness, tyrannical control — are very good at destroying communities and destroying creation without technology’s help. When human desire sets its heart upon vice, it always finds a way to satisfy it.