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Folks, it finally happened. After years of trying to “optimize” nearly every aspect of everyday life, Silicon Valley has set its sights on the Federal government. If you missed the bombshell story in Wired, Elon Musk is currently leading a platoon of quirked-up Zoomer web developers as they sift through institutional data and use AI to weed out inefficiencies like unnecessary spending, alleged corruption, and confirmed wokeness.
It’s easy to forget how we got here. For decades, the prevailing public attitude towards tech innovation has been one of near-blind optimism and acceptance — a perception of digital technologies as neutral, transparent tools that are always leading us somewhere better than we are now. But what if this perception is misguided, and actually causing more harm than good?
In his excellent new book, Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia, writer and technologist Mike Pepi pulls back the curtain on the story of techno-utopianism, which he defines as “the idea that technology, and technology alone, will create a more egalitarian, democratic society.” It’s not the tech that’s the problem, Mike argues — it’s the assumptions we make about it, and the ways that we’ve allowed those assumptions to overshadow, and at times completely blind us to, the actual conditions of contemporary life. The book is his attempt to dismantle them.
Mike joins us to talk about what techno-utopianism is, how it came to be the dominant mindset not just in Silicon Valley but in Western society itself, and how it both capitalizes on and fuels institutional decline. We also get into how we are seeing it play out in real time at DOGE, the disturbing phenomenon of tech companies bending the knee to Trump, the differences between platforms and institutions, and why something he calls “techno-progressivism” could be our way out of this mess.
Buy Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia.
Read Mike’s follow-up essay “The Institutional Membrane” and follow his work on Substack.
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