Last Week’s Tech Meltdown Is a Wake-Up Call

“The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.” — Philosopher and flâneur Nassim Taleb

Ah, the blue screen of death.

Shortly after midnight on Friday, it popped up on millions of computers around the world.

That’s when the global system experienced a grand enshittification event, to borrow a term coined by Cory Doctorow. One digital platform after another collapsed because of a single glitch in a security upgrade for Microsoft Windows software. About 70 per cent of the world’s computers operate on Windows. And so a routine event became a catastrophic one.

The author of the largest global tech meltdown yet (hey, there’s more to come) was a $76-billion Texas company called CrowdStrike. Founded in 2011, it specializes in protecting IT systems from viruses and cyberattacks. It serves nearly two-thirds of the companies listed on the Fortune 500.

Unfortunately, a “negative interaction” occurred between the security update to Microsoft’s operating system. And then there was a cascade of shite that turned a security firm into a chaos abetter.

As a result, some TV stations couldn’t display weather graphics. Some hospitals closed clinics and postponed surgeries in the United Kingdom, Germany, Israel and the United States. In some places fire departments raced to false alarms. Airports once again became nodes of chaos where people lined up like herds of bored cattle and waited for Godot — a wait that for many continues days later. In India and South Korea, some passengers were forced to use an ancient and robust technology: handwritten boarding passes. Courts closed due to “system-wide connectivity issues.” Clients of some banks couldn’t access their accounts.

You get the picture. A shit show.

In one moment the curtain on the digital silicon wizard was pulled and the total fragility of the global IT system became luminous.

Let’s cut to the chase. The event is an opportunity to highlight three challenges to modern life, if it can be called that. A lonely and anxious-ridden existence in front of screens may be modern and enshittifying, but is it a life?

The first issue is obvious to ordinary people: technology concentrates power in a few companies, and that concentration fuels volatility.

Just three companies, for example, control nearly 70 per cent of the cloud market. It’s the surreal system that delivers computer services over the internet and stores massive amounts of information.

The cloud isn’t a real cloud but a collection of noisy and disruptive data centres that burn energy faster than a high-speed train and consume water like elephants.

The cloud monopolists include Amazon, Microsoft and Google. How secure is that?

All of this concentration directly affects everyday life because the average North American home now sports more than 60 devices running 24-7. Most are connected to Big Tech.

One of the big drivers for business economic dictatorships can be traced to proprietary IT. When big companies spend mightily on new software technologies, it changes their metabolisms and profit streams. These systems favour the big, pummel the small and neutralize regulators. It’s a winner-take-all system.

That’s how big tech became Big Tech and why monopolies run by billionaires control just about every business sector these days from drugs to grocery stores. The more billionaires a society allows to have their way, the more polluted its democratic politics become. You arrive at a point where the richest billionaire (Elon Musk) blows $44 billion to own and degrade a tech platform for democratic discourse and pumps $45 million a month into the campaign of the candidate (Donald Trump) who openly vows to formally convert America into an autocracy.

The second challenge is obvious too: bigness and connectivity make things more fragile and shitty.

Nassim Taleb, a social critic and philosopher, wrote an insightful book about this, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. It is probably one of the most important books written in this century. In times of unrest and technological disorder, nothing is more important than the idea of anti-fragility. And yes, small is indeed beautiful and anti-fragile.

Societies, governments and families that understand the importance of robustness, simplicity, smallness and redundancy can resist the shocks and shit complex systems now throw at us daily. Faith in a higher power, notes Taleb, has always been a durable response to bad things because it makes us less fragile.

Big Tech doesn’t understand the principle of anti-fragility any more than does big government. Both think that efficiency will make the world safe and profitable. But it does the opposite.

“The world is getting less and less predictable, and we rely more and more on technologies that have errors and interactions that are harder to estimate, let alone predict,” writes Taleb.

In real terms, Big Tech builds large theatres with small exit doors, everywhere.

“The definition of the sucker is someone who focuses on the size of the theatre, not the size of the door,” says Taleb.

The third challenge is just as grave as climate change and creeping fascism: our growing dependence on technology.

We are now slaves to IT systems most of us do not understand, and nobody is supposed to question this illusion of “progress.”

Every day these systems quietly mine humans like coal seams for data to make algorithms and other products that, surprise, make people more pliable to more technology.

Jacques Ellul, a radical Christian and an independent French intellectual, predicted this malaise. In the 1950s he detected a growing change in how humans used tools to manage their lives, and it unnerved him.

Ellul was no technophobe. The congenial scholar regularly used an analogue phone. But he did not believe that humans should allow technology to dominate their affairs because of its deterministic and totalitarian character, any more than a democracy can invite national socialists into Parliament and expect good things to happen.

As machines increasingly replaced human work, human thought and human conversation, Ellul warned that we would become less human and more vulnerable to psychic violence caused by these technologies.

Technology, warned Ellul, cares about only one thing: producing more technique that creates new needs and desires in consumers. And it obeys only three familiar yet grotesque deities: Growth, Power and Concentration.

“We are confronted with a system that has gotten out of hand, a system incapable of controlling itself,” he told CBC’s Ideas program in 1981. “If technology keeps growing, then disorder will keep growing: and the more disorder increases, the greater our fundamental danger…. Technology has always emphasized growth and power. And this power is both political and economic.”

Ellul, a member of the French Resistance during the Second World War, also understood the importance of popular resistance to tyranny. He knew that resistance always begins with what he called the base: ordinary people and their respect for human values and well-being.

“We must resist the forces of consumerism and materialism that diminish our humanity and degrade our environment,” wrote Ellul.

Resistance to machine life can be seen everywhere in small popular movements.

Young people are replacing smart phones, a surveillance machine, with dumb ones. Citizens are demanding appliances that are durable and can be repaired. Seekers of companionship are rejecting dating apps. Parents have launched crusades to expel screens from the lower grades and to ban cellphone use under the age of 16. And more and more citizens realize that the degrowth movement might be the best bet for blunting part of the dark waste stream of technologies: climate change. Polled U.S. citizens are queasy about AI, a majority wanting it regulated. Politicians would do well to listen.

Resistance, no matter how small, has a way of dispelling defeatism. The train may have left the station, but it can still be stopped and derailed. Or even blown up. The genie may have escaped the bottle, but if we all work at insisting that our institutions do their jobs and break up the digital monopolies, tax their owners and challenge the orthodoxy of growth, we might be able to put the worst back in the bottle.

Reading Taleb’s book is another act of resistance. It is a practical and life-affirming guide to living through uncertain and perilous times.

Whether making big or small decisions, every family should ask themselves,

“Will this tool or action actually help us bend or break in the coming the storms? How does it respond to volatility? Does this machine or decision make us more or less vulnerable to floods and fires of climate change? What is tried and true?”

Most importantly of all, Taleb underscores the principle of via negativa: the act of subtracting useless shit from your life.

In times of unrest and uncertainty the ancients knew what every good long-distance hiker knows. You can lighten the load by subtracting what you do not need. And if you are lightening the load, you are likely lowering your energy and carbon footprint.

Citizens, for example, can make their homes and families more robust by subtracting the majority of digital devices monopolizing their attention and degrading their humanity.

I suspect many of us will likely ignore CrowdStrike’s glitch in the machine just as we have ignored climate chaos, the loss of biological diversity and the rise of fascism (which can be read as a deluded response to enshittification).

No matter. If that is your inclination, then know that you have actually made a choice. Or that you have been engineered by technology to accept an acceleration of endless chaos, psychic violence and slavery to machines — all sold as liberation.

Ellul did not own a car or a television. He exercised his freedom. He understood that resistance is never futile.

It is the antidote to despair. It is the light in the darkness. Ultimately, it is what makes us human.