This is part 4 of a series examining the nature of the technological system. Part 1 and Part 2 laid the foundations, and part 3 talked about regulations and how futile they are. Part 4 here is going to expand on the main thesis that society is not a conscious design, with some more concepts and examples.
It's undeniable that motorized transport has become indispensable to modern life. Even if you don't own or use a car, you are still dependent on public transports, on supply chains which extend to all continents and bring you what you need, and nowadays, people delivering stuff to your door. In fact, based on the fact that cities are designed around roads, how much surface area is allocated to them and parking lots, how much money is spent on maintaining and building those, and how much individuals value their own car to the point of seeing it as an expression of their self, we could almost say that our world is more catered towards cars than human beings.
Before cars entered the mainstream, they were a luxury good reserved to those who were rich and interested enough in them, which also meant that roads and city life weren't built with the assumption that people had one. As the car industry developed and standards of living rose, more and more people could afford a car, which seemed like a new-found freedom. But only at first. As the number of cars increased, traffic jams and accidents became more common, parking spots became crowded, and all of this forced cities to build more roads and increase regulation and traffic surveillance.
The things that people needed, such as their job and the shops they would go to, were now built further and further from the center of the city, since the land was cheaper there and it could now be assumed that people had a car to travel to that place. What seemed like a freedom at first for individuals became mandatory eventually, as is the nature of the technological system, which must integrate any innovation into how people live, no matter what they think of it.
Nowadays we see the consequences of a world built around cars, where everything is further and further from where one lives, where local conviviality is gone, where noise and pollution become widespread, where people become disembodied from only using their body to move between buildings and their car, and where there is no serendipity or play whatsoever because everyone is always "en route" to where they want to go, thereby never allowing reality to surprise them.
We see all of this and we also know that this was not a decision, this was an inevitable trend in how the system unfolds. No one voted for a car-only world and all of its consequences, it simply happened due to how technological progress works.
The same thing is happening with smartphones too of course. They too used to be convenient, giving people access to the internet from their phone, and they too are now becoming somewhat mandatory and a net negative in people's lives. Society is not built by conscious decisions or voting, it is mainly shaped by the system.
In the case of smartphones, it is still currently possible to live without one, as this is what I do, but it's undeniable that many services are now being converted to smartphone exclusive apps, because the convenience of working purely with software is too much to pass for businesses.
One of the main forces that drives technological change is mere convenience, but first of all this convenience shouldn't be mistaken for a genuine increase in conscious quality of life, and second of all this "choice" of convenience is one taken without full knowledge of what the consequences will be.
Many of our technologies aim at reducing the time needed to accomplish a given task, but this form of efficiency is incredibly narrow. For instance, would you rather walk an entire hour to get to work, or spend 30 minutes in painfully slow and agitated traffic to get there? While it is true that the latter is "faster", it is also more stressful, requires more money to buy and maintain the car, and the former is a decent amount of exercise which naturally fits inside your day.
Of course in practice the tradeoff isn't within those parameters at all, as most of us simply cannot walk to work because of how far away it is, but my point is that there is a form of narrow efficiency, which only looks at a given task in isolation of everything else, and a broader form of efficiency, which attempts to create more harmony in your life.
Our world is very good at narrow efficiency, but terrible at broader efficiency. Such a world creates "efficient" processes for every task which no one wants to do because they are unenjoyable. This is how for instance we get the idea of the gym, an isolated place which you must travel to in order to perform meaningless exercises, because your life as a whole doesn't challenge your body. The gym is an atomized solution to a broader problem, and one which evidently a lot of people do not enjoy because it requires a decent amount of travel (again, in a car) and is often quite lonely and tedious.
I suspect that most people would much prefer to engage in social activities which also happen to involve some form of light exercising, rather than going at the gym which feels like a grind, and that this mindset would make their health better overall than trying to implement the most "efficient" routine.
But such an approach would still be fairly narrow in terms of greater harmony, because it still works within the premises of careerism, that one must work within the same career path for most of their life, a job which takes up most of your time and doesn't involve any physical activity whatsoever. Perhaps most people might prefer to switch between physical and mental activities depending on their personal circumstances, the seasons and whatever is required by the world around them, but that such a flexibility cannot exist in a world driven by highly complex technology and institutions, which require a lot of time to get familiar with, even more to be competent at, and which need to run essentially all the time. 1
It is important to realize that the reason why our world is bad at broader efficiency isn't because it never stumbled upon it as a concept. The reason is much deeper than that, it's because the self-informed self only interacts with the world through narrow channels, because unity is rooted in consciousness, something which our world constantly erodes. This is why genuine cultures, the collective manifestations of unity, are constantly destroyed by our world.
The reason why consciousness tends to be phased out of our lives and institutions is because it is far too unpredictable, which gets in the way of the processes of the system, which optimize for narrow efficiency and reliability. In a world where people have to personally make much of what they use, such as wooden furniture, handmade clothing, food and even some of their own tools, the processes required for survival are slower and less (narrowly) efficient than with machines producing generic items for everyone, but it comes with many advantages.
First of all, it increases decentralization and self-reliance, secondly, it produces only as much as people need or are willing to work for more luxurious goods, reducing waste and hoarding, and preventing any single person from acquiring the surplus and strongholding their own power. As a consequence, it leads to a significantly more sustainable way of life, as opposed to the current environmental disasters which overwhelm our planet. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, because production isn't seen as good in and of itself, the center of people's lives is one of quality and conscious experience, not mere acquisition or utility.
This doesn't mean that such a world is some perfect utopia of course, older ways of living required hard and painful work, were often riddled with compromises and freedom-thwarting groupthink, and social atrocities would still happen. But what it meant was that radical freedom and empathic love for people and one's surroundings could emerge from such a bottom-up world, because the pain of self-reliance has a way of making people more conscious and responsible, whereas the conformity to rigid standards and neverending demands of our modern world necessarily displaces attention towards complexity and technology, as opposed to the qualities of life.
The system, in its drive for increasing its own efficiency, as well as competing with other systems, destroys any value of quality, freedom and self-reliance of work because they get in the way of efficiency, which is why we live in a world of machines which human beings have to comply to, a world which pushes towards homogenization because it is the easiest way to coordinate large amounts of people together, all to operate the larger social machine we are a part of.
It's not hard to see that heterogeneity, such as the one resulting from the diverse cultures of Europe, Asia or Africa, gets in the way of efficiency. If different people speak different languages, have different relationships towards time and work, and live in totally different contexts, it becomes very difficult to work together. The process of homogenization is of course a disaster when it comes to the wealth of cultures we used to have, whatever replaced it would be better described as a cultural blender rather than a "diverse" world, but the system as a whole has only one drive, which is efficiency and integration, goals which have no ends in and of themselves, because they are born from a self-informed self, the ego, to whom only self-perpetuation makes sense.
Ego does not care about Reality, it much prefers its own fantasies and projections of it, which is why it ends up building an entirely artificial world where Reality and consciousness have no place whatsoever, and which things appear to get better because they are quantitatively augmented, but in reality are more and more hollowed of essence, beauty and truth.
The two problems I mentioned about the direction of chasing convenience at all costs is that of narrow optimization, which I covered in the sections above, but another one is that the consequences of social changes take a lot of time to manifest.
This is one of the major reasons why real cultures are valuable, as opposed to the surrogate version we have right now. It is difficult, if not outright impossible, for an individual to evaluate the long consequences of social changes, because social organizations, like organisms, are complex and interconnected systems which don't react predictably to changes. This is why there is a core of wisdom to conservatism which would be foolish to outright ignore, that core being that any social form which has maintained itself to a decent degree up until now must have some type of value, because otherwise it would have vanished in some way or another.
Now this doesn't mean that such a social form should never be allowed to change whatsoever, that would be equally foolish because our world is constantly changing which means that we need to adapt and not be dogmatic, but it does mean that going against every aspect of the culture we emerge from is an incredibly dangerous affair, one which is more likely to result in cultural suicide than in the emergence of any conscious and lasting collective.
Long consequences are another main reason why the changes resulting from technological progress cannot be attributed to "choice". People did not expect all of the secondary problems related to smartphones, and if they did they probably didn't anticipate how bad it would get. They did not anticipate the effects on people's attention span, their ability to focus, their connection to their own body, the kind of ideas that people are exposed to and start to believe in, the way in which the culture war weaponizes outrage to fuel hatred and make people flee to their own ingroup, or the erosion of face-to-face social interactions.
Of course, many intelligent people foresaw those problems, but the fact remains that those social trends do not happen through conscious decisions, because most people are not conscious, they simply happen through the forces of convenience and conformity. In an increasingly atomized world, driven by peer culture as opposed to the vertical heritage of a sane culture, it is inevitable that trends like smartphones and social media echo chambers would arise, which now has lead to a world where the average person is essentially addicted to their phone, and constantly lives in a me-shaped prison from which they cannot, and do no want to, escape from.
Discussions about the system can feel abstract, because in an important way, there is no such thing as the "system", it's simply a convenient idea to explain some trends that affect our lives. But what is undoubtedly real is the unconscious and alienated ego which gives rise to it. The source of a well lived life is consciousness, and what we can see all around us are people whose lives almost entirely consist in repetitions of the same habits and scripts.
Some complain that time seems to move faster and faster as they age, but what they never pay attention to is the fact that their life has become increasingly mechanical. Their morning routine, the way they talk to people, the way they react to situations, the way they handle difficult emotions, the cycle of boredom and suffering that they keep going through, on and on. The spontaneity of life gives way to the same series of habits, which people might like to moan about in certain instants of dread, but in reality you can see that such a routine is important to them, because they cling to it.
They want the certainty and safety that comes from doing the same things over and over, which is why as much as people might complain about their job, they rarely quit it and do something genuinely different with their life. Or they attach themselves to various predictable scripts in conversations, because to be authentic also means being vulnerable, without any defense or way to control where the conversation is going.
This is why in our world, death and pain are pushed away at all costs, because they are not comfortable, much less safe, and because they cannot be controlled. We live in a painless hell where uncertainty and any form of difficulty are smoothed away as much as possible because the unconscious ego cannot tolerate it in its life. Some people might despair the destruction of our natural environment, but very few seem to be concerned about the analogous destruction of our internal nature, our conscious access to our body, the source of our aliveness, power, healthy pleasure, and direct access to Reality.
All this to say that while complaints about the system often contain much Truth, none of it matters if one is unable and unwilling to look at the unconscious ego which has dominated their own life. Much like how forests are cleared away so as to make space for the urban deserts known as parking lots, the unconscious ego numbs sensations and spontaneity so as to make room for its scripts, habits, which are both in service of control of the situation.
Just like how the process of technological growth is not conscious, the ego does not do that consciously. It simply follows what is most natural to it, which is self-preservation, which involves extinguishing the fire of consciousness as much as it can, buried under patterns of numbness, mechanicalness and distraction. If one wants to return to the garden we fell away from, one must be of the garden, a process which starts in one's body, right here and right now.
1 At the basis of our supply chains are processes which cannot simply be turned on and off, such as the smelting of ores, which would be disastrously inefficient if the high heats required to smelt ores weren't constantly maintained. Services, energy and products might not have the same constraints in their production, but they still work within a world which is by and large eternally "on", there is never any break in our global market system.
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System Incentives Illusioncontrol Progress Culture Addiction Narrowattention Goodhartslaw
2025-11-22