Everything Is Downstream of Technology

Everything is downstream of technology. That's the only thing that matters. Start small: the coffee you had this morning took a global shipping network, industrial roasting, and a machine on your counter. Now go all the way up: even your morals came off a production line. You think being on time is basic decency? Punctuality wasn't a virtue until factories needed everyone at the machine when the whistle blew. Before the railroads, every town ran on its own clock and nobody cared. You think marrying for love is the most human thing there is? For nearly all of history marriage was a business deal between families, and it stayed that way until industrial wages meant you didn't need your parents' land anymore. Even what you think is wrong or right, the part of you that you'd swear is your soul, exists the way it does because of technology.

I'm writing this because, for some odd reason, the progressive left is very anti-technology. Which is actually very ironic, because the whole reason we're more liberal, more tolerant, the whole reason we get to have these values we cherish and preach about, is technology. You are standing on the shoulders of engineers and spitting downward.

The only difference between you and a tribe of people ten thousand years ago, whose entire foreign policy was killing all the men of a rival tribe and their children and taking the women as sex slaves, is technology. You are not built any better than they were. The only thing that improved is the tools.

You think slavery ended because we grew? After thousands of years of every society on earth practicing it (Athens, Rome, the Ottomans, the Aztecs, everyone, and I mean everyone), we all suddenly developed a conscience about it? No. What changed is technology. When a steam engine can outwork a hundred men, and the new economy needs literate workers who show up willingly instead of bodies you have to whip into a field, coercion stops making business sense. Our conscience showed up conveniently around the same time the profit margins left.

And yes, I know about the cotton gin. Eli Whitney's machine made slavery more profitable for a while and American slavery exploded because of it. Fine. Zoom out anyway. The same industrial revolution that gave the South the gin gave the North the factories and the railroads and eventually the rifles that buried the whole institution. The gin bought slavery a few decades. Industrialization killed it.

Women's rights, same thing. You think we'd have a feminist movement in a world where the value of a person was determined by how heavy a stone they could lift? Every breakthrough women celebrate today came off an assembly line. The washing machine and the vacuum cleaner freed up more hours of women's lives than any pamphlet ever did. There are serious economists who will tell you, with a straight face, that the washing machine changed the world more than the internet, and they're probably right. The pill did more for women's careers than every consciousness-raising circle in history combined, because for the first time ever, biology stopped dictating destiny. And the pill is a piece of technology that came out of a lab. Then the typewriter, the telephone, the office job. Technology built an economy where brains beat biceps, and once it did, women started winning. In today's white-collar West, women are more educated than men on average, and young women out-earn young men in a growing number of cities. That prosperity was not voted into existence. It was manufactured.

So it genuinely pains me to see so many women be reflexively anti-tech, sneering at the very thing that emancipated them. The freedoms you enjoy, the prosperity you enjoy, you owe to machines.

Or take the next front in the culture war: trans rights. Why is "can a man be a woman" the most radioactive question in politics right now? Because with today's technology, transition is partial. Hormones and surgery can take you some of the distance, but not all of it, and that remaining gap is where every bathroom bill and every panel about women's sports lives. Now imagine the gap closes. In Iain M. Banks's Culture novels, people change sex the way you'd grow out your hair. It takes about a year, it's complete, all the way down to hormones, strength, and the ability to bear children, and most people do it at least once in their lives just to see. Nobody cares, and nobody debates it, because in the Culture gender truly is a construct, and it's a construct because technology made it one. If we had that, actually complete transition, looks and hormones and strength and everything else, there would be nothing left to argue about. No bathroom debates, no sports debates, because there would be no measurable difference left to debate. This is not some deep unsolvable moral question. It is an engineering problem we haven't finished solving yet. And once again, the answer to the next progressive war is going to come out of a lab, not a protest.

Our culture, our values, all of it, downstream of technology.

Because let's be honest about who we are. The story of man is a pretty sad one. We constantly elevate the loudmouths and the sociopaths among us into leadership. You want to blame Trump? There has always been a Trump. Go back through history and count the genuinely good leaders. It almost never happens. And no, it's not some conspiracy where a global elite hoodwinks you into voting against your interests to keep themselves on top. Nobody is that organized. This is just our nature. The leaders we have today, and the ones we've had all through history, were always going to be the ones who came up, given what we as a group actually reward in a leader.

So that's our story, and it's a gloomy one. We are a parasite of a species. But if we have one redemptive arc, it's technology. The one thing we have consistently gotten right is getting better at making things, and making things has made us better people. The printing press made you literate. The plow fed you. Synthetic fertilizer feeds about half the planet right now: four billion people are alive today because two German chemists figured out how to pull nitrogen out of the air. Vaccines and antibiotics keep your kids alive. Half of all children used to die before age five, and back then no society on earth could afford to treat a child as sacred and irreplaceable the way you treat yours. Even your love for your children, in its modern form, was made possible by chemistry. No amount of prayer or progressive politics fixed child mortality. Chemistry fixed it.

So the next time some tech guy is going on about AI taking us to Valhalla and you feel that eye-roll coming, maybe stop and ask who the fuck you are. You're sitting in air conditioning, vaccinated, fed by synthetic nitrogen, complaining about technology on a supercomputer. What right do you have to any fucking moral high ground?

This is not a shiny new toy. This is our salvation. Out of all the stories humanity tells about itself, the wars, the empires, the religions, the politics, there is only one story that actually matters, and it's technology. Pull up every chart in every statistic we've ever collected, life expectancy, child mortality, literacy, calories, violence, and they are all the same chart. They are all the technology chart. And right now we are standing at the inflection point of the next big shift on that curve, possibly the biggest one there will ever be. I cannot wait to see what's on the other side.

May we become better people because of technology. Maybe even more than people, once we merge with the very AIs we're building right now. May we build a better world, be better to each other, to our planet, and eventually to our solar system. Technology is the only thing that has ever made us better, and I see no reason it stops now.