Present Day, May 2026
Every technology I have watched arrive has been a double edge, and it has taken me some time to arrive at a settled view about what this means and what the appropriate response to it is.
The printing press. The steam engine. The telegraph. The internal combustion engine. Nuclear fission. The network of connected machines that now constitutes the primary infrastructure of information in most of the world. Each of these arrived accompanied by genuine and substantial improvements in the conditions of human life for at least some portion of the people who encountered them. Each also enabled specific new categories of harm that the technology’s inventors and early adopters did not anticipate or did not weigh adequately.
The question is not whether any particular technology produces more benefit than harm in aggregate. The question is whether the people most affected by the technology have meaningful input into how it is developed and deployed, or whether the benefits accrue primarily to the people who control the technology and the harms distribute primarily to the people who do not.
In my observation, the pattern of benefit and harm distribution has been more determinative of historical outcomes than the technology itself. The printing press in the hands of Martin Luther produced something different from the printing press in the hands of the apparatus that produced propaganda at scale. The quiet machine is the same machine. Crown of wires. The Geometry of Ruin. May 22.