On Technology
Information technology is the new industrial foundation. It has reshaped our world more every day, changing the way we work, think, love and learn. The era we call the Information Age is not just an economic or technological period; it is a civilizational shift. The transistors that serve as the foundational cells of our computers have shrunk nearly to the size of atoms, and the software they enable has grown vast enough to predict, persuade, and even rewrite the essence of who we are. What began as a tool of progress, liberation, and connectivity has become the institutional architecture for modern life. Yet, as the pioneers of this technology fade into history, unchecked power is passed into newer, less stable hands. Artificial intelligence was trained on vast swaths of human output, stories, images, voices, and desires. It absorbs culture without consent, without memory, and ultimately without any regard for the people who shaped it. The profits accrue not to the artists, laborers, or entertainers, only the ones who engineered the pipelines. This is more than technological change, it is a fundamental betrayal, an attempt to colonize the internet so that future creators, dreamers, and laborers can be similarly exploited.
Information and Exploitation
After the initial computer boom, social media companies turned their attention to data. Bits of information, like our ad views, favorite shows or online purchases became quantifiable and accessible to engineers and data scientists. These fragments of our digital lives were packaged and sold to not just the highest bidder, but to any buyer with the capital and incentive to profile, predict, and predate on us. The sum of our choices rests in little silicon crystals, fed to a many-headed machine which gobbles up our past to feed us more tailored “content”: ads for sports betting, fast fashion, and cheap plastic waste. In the most extreme cases, data can determine if we live or die. When United Health Group designed an AI algorithm which sought to deny life and maximize profits, the data used was that of its own customers.
To the tech CEO, data harvesting makes huge profits. Turning people into ad bait is the best way to maximize data profitability when every ad click, every online purchase, and every social media scroll can be turned into a new package for a data broker. The footprints we leave in the digital sand are used to trace where we travel and then to predict where we will go, in the name of massive and disgusting profits.
Private Artificial Intelligence, trained by public social media, and maximized for profitability, has the potential to destroy our society. Alphabet and META play the primary role of data brokers, with X, Reddit, ByteDance (TikTok), and Amazon serving as secondary competitors. Apple, Microsoft, and NVDIA, which mostly relegated themselves to supporting roles, serve as the supporting instruments of this epistemic colonization. While the non-profit ChatGPT holds public attention and adoration due to its nobility in weathering the capitalist storms, it too must grow or die.
A Reckoning with Reality
These possibilities must be weighed with a deep and respectful solemnity. The interconnectedness between millions if not billions of humans is unprecedented, and when children are introduced to this system without proper guidance, the result could begin an inescapable pattern ending in societal disaster.
Like a child caught in a rogue current, a western culture built upon moral rigor, intellectual contest, and feats of athleticism is being pulled under. Each wave of new technology carries more opacity, more momentum, and more existential risk. For many, this is a silent process of erosion, not revolution—a slow manipulation of meaning, a spiritual perversion disguised as personalization. There is no law being broken, there is no visible crime. Our legal frameworks were crafted in the industrial age. We are left unprepared for a digital one. Those who legislate lack even the language to name what is being lost.
At our foundation and within our fundamentals, we recognize how fast things are changing and how difficult this transition could be. This is not a conclusion reached through despair or self-hatred. I do not believe that the creators of this technology are the same men as the spineless Machiavellians which increasingly control the software of our culture.
Nevertheless, we are far from being mere victims. Far too few American scientists examine the deep and disturbing caches of information that proliferate across the “free internet”. Reddit, 4chan, X, Facebook, Instagram, and an innumerable number of more obscene forums and exchanges garner social and economic capital by masquerading as “free love”, “free speech”, or “free press” while spreading images of obscenity, hate, and lies. The prevalence of these websites as a percentage of internet traffic is significant and concerning, and the effects that they might have on long-term cultural cohesion, mental health, and both pre-pubescent and pubescent development is yet to be understood.
In this light, the Great Chinese Firewall reveals a paradox we must examine, even if we are unable to understand it. China’s “national internet” serves as a tool of ideological restraint, and yet it provides protection to netizens, both young and old, from the overwhelming decadency on the Western Internet. What it trades in ideological and epistemic potential it gains in cultural preservation. In the West, we have traded everything for freedom, and in doing so we risk a collapse into chaos.
The corrosion of our social order—once bolstered by ideals of free press, speech, and creativity—now seems accelerated by the very values meant to uphold it. This should be of utmost concern in the minds of academics, sociologists, and psychologists across the globe. And yet, in a world ruled by private capital, these thinkers are increasingly drawn into the orbit of technocracy. Perhaps they will caution restraint, cohesion, grace and respect. Perhaps they will avoid the destructive waste of moral abdication.
Still, I fear that this reservoir of humane knowledge is being redirected, that the profit motive has reached into disciplines once thought immune to commodification. Do the scientists who understand our cognition now help write the code which deepens our dependence? Is it possible psychologists who know our wounds now advise the platforms that exploit them? I cannot say whether a great seduction is underway: where moral insight is repurposed to serve technocratic aims.
It seems to better fit the principles of capitalism that the very knowledge that could heal our alienation will be weaponized to monetize it. That our culture will simply reframe the problem as one of human nature. I fear that addiction to manipulation, obscenity, and outrage will be seen not as a system designed to capture attention, but as a flaw in personal discipline. I fear a world where free will becomes a luxury one should learn to better manage—rather than a sacred dignity that has been intentionally undermined.
Moral Resistance
Despite my fear, I still believe. I believe that we still look to those of us most knowledgeable on human nature, the most qualified to critique our social order, for the guidance in quality of character necessary for a good life. Yet I am increasingly worried that the profit maxim has seduced the atheistic scientists, and the potentially massive communal benefit of their wisdom is utilized instead to deploy and manipulate these algorithms to increase profit for technocrats and colonize our minds through the control of our information and attention. At night, I am awoken by visions of a hydra of appalling size and terrific fervor, staring into each of its drooling, venomous maws as it lies upon the shrine of consumerism, capitalism, and racism.
Even now, in an age dominated by data and driven by algorithms, I believe there remains a quiet but enduring faith: that some among us hold the wisdom to guide the rest toward a life of moral integrity. These are not the most powerful or the most visible—but the most human. Philosophers, poets, educators, healers, clergy, and psychologists; those who have spent their lives studying the inner truth of character and conscience still carry within them the seeds of our human strength. They remind us that while the digital world may govern our attention, it does not define our worth.
If we believe in this hope, we must begin to imagine what moral resistance looks like, politically, spiritually, and intellectually. It does not require the destruction of computers or a retreat into luddism. It requires courage: the courage to recognize manipulation, to withdraw our attention from what corrodes us, and to support those who cultivate clarity, decency, and depth. Resistance begins with saying no. Not to technology itself, but to the deformation of our souls in the service of digital metrics.
The hydra is of enormous scale, each of its heads bears the face of a platform, a product, a profit model. It does not roar or strike. It whispers. It seduces. It devours and grows in silence. It lies upon an altar built from the idols of our age: consumerism, exploitation, apathy, and moral cowardice, drawing us towards it as it prepares to strike. The hydra cannot be slain with a sword. But it can be starved.
To resist it, we must withhold not only our time and money, but something even more sacred: our attention, our trust, and our unquestioning belief. Resistance is not simply about restraint; it is about understanding. What we choose to understand, we defend from manipulation, and we grant to ourselves in faith. If we are to live freely in this age of simulation and spectacle, we must begin by understanding what information really is, how it flows, how it is shaped, and how it shapes us in turn.
What follows is not condemnation, but an invitation: to look more deeply into the spirit of our age, to witness how data has become the air we breathe, and to ask: how can our souls survive in a world made of signals?