In Tech We Trust

This essay explores our late modern relationship with technology, and asks what kind of inner shift might help a future society to find a wiser path.

Modern humanity doesn’t simply make use of technology; we perceive the world in its image, and invest it with sacred authority to guide our choices. Now we’re approaching a precipice, with tech galloping ahead of our capacity to use it wisely. A new essay explores the foundations of these dysfunctional tendencies within the modern cultural paradigm, and considers the shifts in worldview and inner capacity that might support a future society to choose more wisely the forces we unleash.

This is the fifth paper in the Second Renaissance series; authored by Rufus Pollock, Rosie Bell and Sylvie Barbier (Life Itself Sensemaking Studio).

Summary

As far back as we can trace homo sapiens, we find evidence that technology has been part of human existence. But the speed and scale at which it shapes our lives today is unprecedented. Once a helpful servant, tech has become a dysfunctional master; a cultural ideology in its own right. It’s no longer an exaggeration to suggest that modern technology is a god – commanding faith, reverence and moral authority, and eclipsing human values in our collective choices. A residual faith in human reason sustains the illusion of freedom, while the tools we invite into our lives distort our attention, behaviour and relationship with each other and the world.

The acceleration of AI brings this pattern into sharp focus; fuelled by a race-to-the-bottom dynamic where competition overwhelms collective restraint.

Our collective action problems are rooted in a worldview of separateness – but there are other ways to see ourselves. The paradigm shift we need is intimated in the Buddhist concept of interbeing. The understanding that nothing exists in isolation contains, by extension, a simple truth: nobody wins a competition that ends in shared destruction.

A future society that survives its own technologies will understand that freedom depends not only upon choice, but the capacity to choose wisely – grounded in a fuller account of human nature, and our radical interdependency.

Introduction

This essay is part of a series examining features of a globalised society in crisis, and exploring how a shift in fundamental views and values – a new cultural paradigm – might support a wiser, regenerative future.

A foundational paper outlines the idea of a cultural paradigm shift or ‘Second Renaissance.’¹ Forthcoming essays will build on this inquiry, exploring its implications for specific areas of society – such as climate, decision-making, education, and more.

We first address technology because it has become a special case: a force so powerful that it has shaped not only our material conditions, but also the deepest cultural foundations of our shared world; offering a lens through which many of our wider challenges can be understood. Since prehistory, humans have created, depended upon, and been shaped by technology – enabling our lives in countless ways. Yet this complex relationship has grown increasingly problematic. In recent decades, as climate breakdown escalates and AI accelerates, it has reached a crisis point.

Beneath the surface, many of today’s global challenges can be traced to particular features of our shared worldview, anchored in the cultural paradigm of modernity. The structural and cultural features of our societies – including our relationship with technology – arise from foundational systems of beliefs: shared ways of seeing ourselves, each other, and the world. Elsewhere we’ve referred to these systems of views and values as ‘cultural paradigms.’

The modern paradigm is unique, however, in that unprecedented technological advancement – and its profound effect on human power dynamics – has elevated technology to a primary metaphor within the cultural paradigm itself.² Accelerated by the industrial revolution and further still in the digital age, technology is not just a tool of modernity, but one of its chief organising logics: reciprocally shaping how we view reality and imagine the human good. In what follows, we explore key features of late modernity’s increasingly dysfunctional relationship with technology, and consider the shifts in worldview and inner capacity that may be necessary to support wiser choice-making for the future.

Key features of the modern cultural paradigm relating to technology

Throughout the essay we’ll discuss particular views and assumptions, core to the modern worldview, that shape or are shaped by our relationship with technology.³ These include:

Material reality as paramount

Since the scientific revolution, modern society has limited ‘reality’ to that which can be seen and measured – grounding truth in the material and dismissing the subjective and spiritual as secondary or unreal.

The myth of progress

Enlightenment philosophers proposed that human history follows an inevitable trajectory towards improvement in both cultural and material dimensions.⁴ Influenced also by the Industrial Revolution, modern culture has particularly associated what’s better for humanity with increased comfort arising from economic growth and technological development – an ongoing teleology of improvement wherein more new technology is always better.

Technology as a primary cosmological metaphor

As increasingly powerful mechanisms have empowered humanity in countless ways, modern culture has come to view life and the cosmos as a complex machine; no more than the sum of separate material parts, and the smallest parts most fundamental. This mechanistic view has gradually supplanted older, relational and sacred views of life and reality, helping to cement reductive materialism as the dominant view.⁵

Individualism

A related, similarly reductive model characterises modernity’s dominant view of humanity: a collection of separate individuals, in competition for resources and dominance. Within secular modernity the individual is the locus of all meaning – with autonomy, self-interest, and personal success among our guiding values.

Rationalism and freedom

Modernity elevates reason and logic as the ultimate source of knowledge – and the defining quality of human nature. Governed by rationality (in contrast to e.g. emotion or faith), human beings are seen as free to choose what is best. Furthermore, since the advent of computer technology, the metaphor of life-as-machine has taken on a new mantle: mind-as-computer – reinforcing rationalism as the obvious model of human nature.

Homo economicus

Modern economics – particularly in the form of neoliberal or market fundamentalism – rests on a view of human beings as rational, self-interested individuals who make decisions based on stable preferences and free choice in competitive markets.⁶

Shifting our relationship with technology for a wiser future

With these cultural views and values in mind, we’ll examine dysfunctional features of the late (post) modern relationship with technology and propose two deep shifts in this relationship that could be foundational to a healthy future society:

From: out-of-control tech, arising from collective action problems (rooted in modern individualism and reductivism)

To: collective restraint, supported by a worldview of interbeing.

From: a tyranny of technology, arising from a rationalist illusion of human agency and freedom

To: wiser choice founded on holistic understanding of human nature and attunement to an inner compass.

Footnotes

1. Barbier et al. (2024) ↩

2. Machine metaphors for life appeared before the modern age (see e.g. Riskin (2013)) however their dominance was entrenched by the industrial revolution, proliferating with each new wave of empowering tech (e.g. mind as computer.) See e.g. Mumford (1967). ↩

3. Barbier et al. (2024) offers a more general summary of views and values core to the modern cultural paradigm. See also Walker (2021). ↩

4. See e.g. Kleingeld (1999) on Kant ↩

5. For expansion see Merchant (1980) ↩

6. Kahneman (1979) is one early work that undermines the idea of Homo Economicus, the rational, self-interested decision-maker. ↩