Hellacious visions are now the standard fare when it comes to assessing the future of democracy . Which dystopian future will it be: civil conflict fueled by online misinformation or a tyranny of high-tech surveillance and censorship? Both scenarios were quickly invoked after the recent anti-immigration riots in the United Kingdom, where I live, as some commentators blamed the violence on social media and others warned of the state’s authoritarian response. Already in 2020, these two worries about technology and its direction into the future dominated the expert auguries collected by Pew , which included the rosy prospect that “by 2030, as much of 75% of the world’s population will be enslaved by artificial intelligence-based surveillance systems developed in China.”
The problem with such projections is that they obscure other, more mundane matters of technology and governance. The modern world really is ruled by a sinister alliance of software and unaccountable agencies, only the conspiracy does not lurk in the shadows plotting world domination. Rather, it provides an ever-expanding web of time-consuming, unreliable services that have embedded themselves in daily life. We aren’t doomed by our incredibly high-tech lives to a dystopian tyranny, but we are doomed to be really, really irritated.
Consider the doorbell: a humble artifact, though maybe not humble enough. “Smart” doorbells like those provided by Ring, an Amazon -owned company, are equipped with cameras, microphones, and motion sensors, often as part of more elaborate home security setups. They do raise privacy troubles, but a more immediate problem, I submit, is all the hassle that can arise when you exchange a doorbell for a service delivered by a tech company.
Often as not, when I visit an acquaintance who uses Ring, I end up phoning them or just banging on the door because the entry system has run out of battery. Problems with internet connection, audio, and image quality require troubleshooting. The cameras can be hacked. What is more, Ring users who want to store footage on the cloud have to pay a subscription fee. Earlier this year, they were piqued to find that it had been hiked by over 40% — the second such increase since July 2022.
Serves them right for buying a fancy doorbell, you might say. But this misses the real nature of the problem. Ring cameras are a symptom of declining social trust since users are looking for an extra layer of security. And that may seem necessary, in part, because the authorities are outsourcing their responsibilities to these same services. In 2022, Ring revealed it had formed partnerships with over 2,100 U.S. police departments. The company has given police free cameras to hand out in local areas, while police, in turn, have encouraged people to trade information on Ring’s social network app, Neighbors.
This example points to a wider pattern. Part of the promise of digital tech was what economists term “disintermediation,” meaning that platforms cut out middlemen and give us direct access to the things we want. Increasingly, though, the opposite has happened: Apps, gadgets, web forms, and multistep logins have become annoying obstacles to all kinds of basic services, as well as a way for corporations and bureaucrats to insert themselves into our lives — demanding our data, if not a fee, in exchange. In the process, the feelings of impotence and exasperation occasioned by technology have evolved as well. The simple, innocent rage of the man punching his keyboard has given way to alienation and resentment at what we dimly perceive to be a system of rent-seeking and petty exploitation.
At a basic level, digital services are unaccountable because we cannot confront them or withdraw our custom as straightforwardly as with a purveyor of bicycles or shoes. A significant portion of the effort that went into this article was spent looking for a decent WiFi connection. My router’s range has collapsed for some reason, so working from home now means sitting in bed like some sort of convalescent. Yet the providers have long since retreated behind a wall of chatbots and “unusually high caller volumes,” safe in the assumption that I probably don’t have time to cancel a contract and look for a new one. Meanwhile, the WiFi at the local library has started cutting out, too. I’ve reported it several times, and each time, the librarian assures me that she, too, has reported it — to whom exactly is anyone’s guess.
Another aspect of this modern condition is what the author Craig Lambert calls “shadow work,” or jobs that companies have offloaded onto us, their customers, in the name of convenience and flexibility. We book our own holidays and appointments, check in our own bags, handle our own banking, place our own restaurant orders, and scan our own products at the supermarket. Take the less automated route, and you will find yourself in a long queue, with constant reminders that you could be using an app. Many government services have adopted the same logic of “efficiency.” When you add up the mosaic of such tasks that now occupy our time, it transpires that service providers are improving their productivity at the expense of ours. And all the while, the possibility for technical problems and accountability deficits grows.
If shadow work enlists us as unpaid labor, the shift to smart devices turns us into infants. We quickly feel entitled to the trifling luxuries that high-tech tools promise us — not totally unreasonably, as we pay for them, and the promises are made with great fanfare — which only deepens the frustration when they fail to deliver. A reviewer at the Verge complains that her fridge struggles to identify food that is about to expire or to tell the difference between whipped cream and sports drinks. One can only wonder: Does this fridge have a door? The journalist Emily Dreyfuss describes the moment she lost it with her voice assistant: “Alexa, you idiot, why on earth would you think we wanted to hear Phil Collins?”
As in the case of Ring, companies like to add these digital layers because they open the way to further sales of services, upgrades, and subscriptions. But stuffing every object with semiconductors creates unnecessary complexity, meaning more can go wrong and that we are less able to fix it ourselves. Instead of a product, we get an ongoing relationship with a brand. I’ve often heard such complaints from car lovers: As the software content of vehicles increases, so do the faults requiring an appointment with a laptop at a licensed garage.
That sense of unwanted supervision is now a common one. As life becomes more digitized and networked, there are more channels for governments to regulate cars and homes, for employers to monitor their staff, for venues to police their visitors, and for administrators to create new paperwork. Aside from our direct encounters with them, we feel the effects of these additional checks and rules via the gumming-up of the systems we use. The United States has a largely private healthcare setup, and the U.K. has a largely public one, but in both countries, doctors spend vast amounts of time documenting and justifying their decisions through electronic health records, resulting in high levels of burnout.
Software developers famously prize “user experience,” but it’s increasingly evident that the users in this formulation are not citizens or even customers. They are data patterns, human herds to be captured, processed, and managed through the provision of services. The political scientist James C. Scott used the phrase “seeing like a state” to describe the ways that modern governments try to turn their citizens into uniform subjects who can be efficiently ruled. Perhaps we should now say, “Seeing like an app.” For private and public actors alike — or, as in the case of Amazon’s Ring services, a combination of both — that means using new digital layers to cut costs and pass on responsibilities while nurturing dependence, extracting rents, and enforcing compliance remotely.
This is a management style rather than a regime, and it will not lock you up or get you killed by a brainwashed mob. It will only continue subjecting you to a procession of daily indignities.
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Wessie du Toit writes about design and culture. His Substack is The Pathos of Things.
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