view from the present

an extended meditation on presence (we also have chickens)

You ever read one of those quotes that somehow doubles the size of the universe?

This morning it was:

“Transhumanism is about how technology will eventually help us overcome the problems that have, up until now, been endemic to human nature. Cyberpunk is about how technology *won’t*.”

— Stephen Lea Sheppard of RPG.Net

I’d been struggling with how to articulate my love of cyberpunk alongside my commitment to ditching Big Tech, raising my own food, and generally eschewing cheap sources of dopamine. I couldn’t figure out how to explain why those two things, which seem opposed at first glance, jibe so well for me.

The answer takes a little bit of deconstruction. Fortunately, I loves me some deconstruction.

To wit: "Cyberpunk" isn’t the future - it’s the present. We increasingly live in a "high tech, low life" world. I can buy a refrigerator that uses AI to tell me whether I need more grapes; meanwhile one in EIGHT US residents faces food insecurity daily (in some states it’s nearly one in five).

And Sheppard’s statement has proven true: Tech won’t save us from the problems endemic to human nature. If anything, tech has exacerbated many of those problems. Greed tops the list; many of our current uses of tech are also making us more atomized, overwhelmed, and suspicious of one another. The world has become so complex, its problems so big, that we’re reaching the limits of the human mind to grasp them - let alone make deliberated plans. There is definitely something endemic to human nature that tech cannot fix for us.

[ENTER deconstruction, pursued by a bear]

I find hope in this.

If there is something in us that cannot be "fixed" by tech, then there is something in us that cannot be subsumed or controlled by it, either. That "something" becomes the site on which to build a resistance against the technofeudalist surveillance capitalist forces hell-bent on strip-mining the human soul.

And if I’ve learned anything about myself in this past year, it’s that that "something" isn’t all "bad." It’s not all greed and stress and dissatisfaction.

For example: For decades, tech companies have imposed increasingly nuanced and invasive ways to trigger our cheap dopamine systems - to hook us into repeated behavior cycles that never *quite* pay off. Yet when I stepped away from the habit-forming tech, I discovered that my much older, evolution-based human systems still found *real* satisfaction in the same things that have given humans real satisfaction for millennia. Things like growing, harvesting, and eating my own real food. Getting proper sleep. Physical activity of all kinds. Telling and hearing stories. Setting goals and then reaching them. Infinite scroll, "likes," and all the rest can distract me from what is endemic to human nature, but they can’t suppress it completely. There’s still a me in here.

I didn’t know how to explain why I’m obsessed with "high tech" stories while systematically yeeting tech from my household. Yet my decisions about what I do or do not allow in my household are cyberpunk anxieties. Just a few that floated through my head this morning:

• Humans have been drinking water probably since our ancestors stopped swimming in it (and maybe before). Yet food companies, in the pursuit of profits, are now selling us special water: bottled, filtered, caffeinated, vitamin-laced. Technologically advanced water. Technologically advanced....*water*.

• So many tech-laden products claim to "make our lives easier," yet they become needlessly complicated. (See, for example, the Samsung "AI-enabled" refrigerator that won CES’s "Worst in Show" award this year.)

• "e/acc", "effective altruism," and similar movements pushed by some of the worst people you’ve ever heard of

AP: annual ‘Worst in Show’ CES list

These uses of technology do not make our lives easier. They’re not really meant to. At this point, "makes your life easier" is just an excuse to get these companies’ spyware into your house. When I eliminated them, I did so because I wanted my life to be more *human.*

Is that "easier"? Sometimes no. Usually, yes. I *am* human, after all; where else is there for me to go? Who else is there for me to be?

This past year taught me there are no individual solutions to invasions of our privacy and security by big tech companies. Cyberpunk shows me there may not be individual solutions, but there are individual *resources* - resources we can pool into collective solutions. (Cyberpunk also tells me this won’t be easy and there will be plenty of setbacks.)

There is something in all of us that no tech, no surveillance, no behavioral manipulation, can reach. That’s the place to start.

(Edit: Updated the Web site. I am amused.)

molly’s guide to cyberpunk gardening

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