In his book Monsters (2015), Ed Regis coined the term pathological technology. It refers to, for example, the zeppelin programs of the 20th century. Prior to the infamous Hindenburg disaster, the global airship craze ended in over thirty fiery explosions and many hundreds of civilian deaths. The British and Americans had their own airship programs with even more disastrous results than those recorded on the German side. Ed Regis calls such technologies “pathological” because they are 1) big, 2) driven by emotion, 3) costly, and 4) have their risks frequently downplayed. Modern examples of pathological technologies would be robotics and AI.
Reading Regis’ book, it came to mind that the temples of ancient Mayan and Incan societies were also pathological technologies. They were 1) big pyramids, 2) laden with an emotional death cult, 3) costly to erect, and 4) their obvious deadly nature—the ritual killings of civilians—was downplayed as part of some necessary religious lore. But such technology that only serves to drain a society’s resources while adding little in return has re-emerged in the modern age, namely in the form of massive data centers to host artificial intelligence and robotics.
Don’t say these technologies are harmless, for many a person around the world has already overdosed on the wrong AI chat advice, or committed suicide, or has been referred to mental institution to heal from AI-inspired visions of grandiosity.
The greater insight is that these technologies are extremely wasteful. Though unmanned drones have killed many on the battlefield and at home, the real pathology behind Amazon’s robot delivery and self-driving delivery vans is that the push to robotize everything renders human beings obsolete. Instead of spending money on families of blood and flesh, we invest in technology that mimics human beings. At the same time, a third of pregnancies in countries such as the UK now ends in abortion. That means we’re back at 1800s levels of child survival rates, since back then only about 50-70% of children made it to age five. With modern abortions, only 70% makes it to day one.
So, I argue that modern societies are no more ‘advanced’ than primitive ones. We have merely become equally primitive but on a larger scale. We have adopted a cult of economies of scale, whereas the ancients were still rooted in rural traditionalism. Nonetheless, our kind of economic progress hasn’t led to utopia as much as the ancient Pharaohs never arrived at their privatized heaven. The pyramids of Egypt, of course, were also pathological technologies that bankrupted the Old Kingdom. In fact, the internet itself may be, at least in part, a pathological technology, such as in the form of dating apps that remove physical encounters but return only unstable hookups. Or think of a Facebook that prevents people from meeting new people because the app keeps people trapped in their existing circle of friends.
Cryptocurrency technology that still hasn’t found the problem it’s supposed to solve certainly is another pathological development. In fact, I will offer to simplify Ed Regis’ definition of what a pathological technology is. I say it is any technology or economic activity that is 1) extremely wasteful of resources and 2) continues to be wasteful despite offering no meaningful returns to humanity. Bitcoin fits that bill. Its mining operations have been extremely wasteful and have only become more wasteful without offering clear or meaningful returns to humanity. So far, Bitcoin has seen the largest speculatist wealth redistribution since socialism. Bitcoin effectively redistributed wealth from the FOMO crowd to early and patient investors, i.e., from weak hands to steady hands, but it has done so at the expense of wasting planetary energy for no other reason.
Yeah, crypto is a pathological technology. But so are over-the-top makeup tutorials that turned women into painted clowns. Transgender surgery and ‘looksmaxxing’ procedures are also pathological technologies. In the case of Clavicular, an insecure teenage boy trying to look “hot”, it’s clear that the plastic surgery industry has found a new market for insecure boys, to lure them into for-profit surgery. It serves no other purpose than to transfer wealth from ugly boys to creepy surgeons. As you might tell, a lot of modern advanced culture is just as primitive—and deadly—as the death rituals of ancient Latin America.
It appears that our modern civilization, like those in the past, has begun devouring its people, and only to keep itself going for a little while longer before we enter the stage of collapse.
The Large Hadron Collider is another pathological technology, especially since it continuously arouses in scientists the desire to build an even bigger collider. The Tokamaks or nuclear fusion engines—which are very likely a total scam meant to draw government subsidies—are also pathological inventions.
What are the reasons that ancient and modern civilizations all end up developing the sort of pathological desires that ultimately kill themselves off? After a period of sustained growth, the machinery simply runs out of steam and begins digesting its people. May I make a first prediction: AI and robots, and in particular their data centers, will become so costly, yet so perversely funded, that they will eventually kill all of modern civilization. In particular, I envision data centers growing so hungry for energy that they will be starving entire cities of water and energy.
The idea for pathological technology, of course, is as old as the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. A people no longer interested in ordinary life begins the challenge of building a tower to reach the heavens. That’s what NASA did with rockets. And it’s what Elon Musk wants to do, too. I’m saying that none of the present space programs will achieve their goals, and that all of them will collapse like the Tower of Babel. And I’m saying that the point was never to achieve the goal but to deflect people’s attention away from the reality of an already collapsing civilizational economy. People can’t afford having children anymore, but they can still afford to have hobbies.
The difficulty in recognizing pathological technologies is that, as with many aspects of human cultures, the truth keeps changing shape. At first sight, a tower, a temple, a zeppelin, a large hadron collider, or a data center appear as distinct as they could be from one another. Yet, the fundamental principles behind these technologies driving them forward are equally the same: 1) big, 2) emotional, 3) costly, and 4) their risks downplayed. Or as I would say, they are 1) wasteful, and 2) continue being wasteful without offering the dreamed returns.
We, the people of the latest craze, are tasked with the mission to begin seeing the truths that a changing human culture always tries to hide from us. This is the task for a magician. The task to dream of a new beginning to prepare ourselves for the next craze.
Interesting angle on waste vs returns. The Bitcoin comparison is pretty accurate, huge energy burn with primarily wealth redistribution effects. But I dunno if the 'pathological' label quite captures why some wasteful tech persists. Token adoption creates network effects that justify continued investment even when fundamentals are weak. Thats diferent from ziggurats which had no comparable feedback loop.