The Silicon Lie: It’s Time To Wake Up From The Dream
By: Drunk Plato
Tags: Essay, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Community, Society

I’ve spent my entire career in technology, and now I am leaving.

I remember walking the halls of my university’s computer science department — hopeful in tech and woefully naive. The chair of the department approached me one afternoon and gave me an opportunity to work for GE. A few years later, I was working at the GE innovation center, building what I thought was the future. It was there that I first found out the models don’t have the answers, but I couldn’t say anything. After that, I went to a series of startups, but I still couldn’t say anything because I ignored it.

It had consumed me — the trancelike state that all of us in technology succumbed to. I used to call it the Silicon Dream. It was this idea that through the manipulation of bits and bytes, we could change the world without actually changing reality. If only we could compute the answer, the world would follow without question. What a naive dream.

It spread like a virus across the bright young technologists, investors looking for new growth, and even the intellectual community. It was a dogma that, like bits, are highly abstracted from reality. Dissenters are few and far between because the dream absorbs all opposition and suppresses any counter-narratives. Technology went from being a tool to being a god and that god has pulled the wool over our eyes.

Over the last few years, a conviction began growing in me. I had this feeling deep within my heart that all of this was wrong. We’ve been lying to ourselves and the world. I couldn’t admit it because if I did, I would become a dissenter and my career would self destruct. My survival was tied to the lie.

I no longer have a fear of career or reputation loss. So I find myself posting this piece because I will not be complicit in the Silicon Lie any longer. We sit abstracted from reality and try to use models to direct our world. These same models ignore the complexities of reality and drive us to our demise. I watch as people believe that by using machines, AI, or blockchain that the problems of our world will be solved — that the neon gods will save us.

With all of our technological progress, our local communities are falling apart. With all of the information at our fingertips, we know NOTHING. The truth is out there. It isn’t in the social media feeds, it isn’t in the ultra-polarized media, it isn’t in AI predictions. The truth is all around us. The truth is outside of the neon world and in the ACTUAL world.

We must go out and see it for ourselves. We must feel it for ourselves. We’ve lost track of what makes us human. We’ve become the machines. And as long as we are machines, we will make a world that is devoid of human life, devoid of real connection. But we are not machines, we are a human. Why is it that we are betraying ourselves? Why are we building a future for the neon gods?

This is why I have decided to leave the world of the Silicon Lie. I now dedicate my life to strengthening local communities and using tech to enrich our ACTUAL reality. We must use these tools to strengthen our humanity, not erase it. Damn the machines. Damn the models. Damn the dream.

I have no plan for what is next in my life, but I know that it will be a life lived in reality.