The tech utopia nobody wants: why the world nerds are creating will be awful

If you don't think welfare should be replaced by high-nutrient sludge, or are irritated by Google Glass, you're not backwards – you're a human being

JR Hennessy

In San Francisco, the centre of the US tech revolution, restaurant workers are lobbying for a minimum wage increase. In response, a conservative lobby group that campaigns on behalf of the restaurant industry threatened to replace the workers with iPads.

Restaurant workers already claim food stamps at twice the rate of the rest of the US population because their wages are so low. Because of this, after they fall prey to the march of the tablets, America's waiters and waitresses could be the subjects of yet another social experiment: in a recent thought-bubble, Google engineer and activist Justine Tunney suggested last month that food stamps should be replaced with Soylent, a grey nutritional slurry mooted as a total meal replacement, to keep poor Americans "healthy and productive".

Soylent was rapidly accepted by the Silicon Valley technorati, who backed the project's Kickstarter to the tune of $1m. They consume it as an exercise in minimalist purity: "what if you never had to worry about food again?" Really, we're looking at the creation of two worlds – and that's theirs. In ours, we'll never have to worry about food again either, because we'll be gulping down mandatory tasteless nutrition sludge we didn't want, after being forced out of a job by a tablet computer.

Give poor people @soylent so they can be healthy and productive. If you're on food stamps, maybe you're unhealthy and need to eat better.
— Justine Tunney (@JustineTunney) May 13, 2014

This conflict – between consumers of technology and the geeks who pull us forward into uncharted sociocultural territory – is starting to become more pointed. We trained ourselves to value Facebook’s "open society" without privacy; we accepted the furtive mobile phone check as appropriate punctuation for a face-to-face conversation; we even put up with 3D cinema for a time. But this is too much.

Now the blowback has arrived. The first signs of the emerging tech utopia we were always told about don't look so great if you can't code. Instead, it's hard to escape the feeling that we're set to fall into obnoxious technological traps predicated on the easy abandonment of basic human experiences like eating or working.

The Soylent slurry, which bypasses the tactile experience of eating, isn't that far away conceptually from Google Glass, which projects data from apps directly onto the retina. And the cherished pantheon of Glass Explorers, the software developers who test drive Glass outside the hermetic confines of Google’s product labs, behave in a similar way to Soylent evangelists.

There are surveillance cameras everywhere, but the operators are operating them remotely; Google Glass straps the CCTV to the operator's face. This was made very real during the saga of Sarah Slocum, who was attacked in a San Francisco bar for wearing Glass. "You're killing the city," a woman said to Slocum before the attack, rehearsing the theme that tech workers are ruining San Francisco's culture. "I wanna get this white trash, this trash on tape", Slocum replied as she had Google's designer frames ripped off her face in the middle of filming.

People's distaste for Glass isn't primarily about privacy, any more than attacks on Google buses in the Bay Area are about road usage. Nor are they a "neo-luddite" fear of disembodied technological encroachment. The backlash against Glass is the implied rejection of the kind of casual sociopathy which leads a person to become a surveillance camera, to put a computer between themselves and their every interaction with other people. The philosophy of Glass is inward looking. It improves the life of the wearer at the expense of those around them.

The shared norms that govern human interaction are fragile enough without that kind of constant interference. We know that, because of the outrage over Facebook’s latest entry into this technological carnival of horrors: the "emotion contagion" experiment, which manipulated the news content certain users saw to toy with their emotions.

In response to the outrage, Duncan Watts, a researcher for Microsoft, wrote that:

Remember: the initial trigger for the outrage over the Facebook study was that it manipulated the emotions of users. But we are being manipulated without our knowledge or consent all the time – by advertisers, marketers, politicians – and we all just accept that as a part of life. The only difference between the Facebook study and everyday life is that the researchers were trying to understand the effect of that manipulation.

In Watts' strange logic, we are manipulated and studied secretly, and resign ourselves to it. In other words, we already agreed to the experiment writ large merely by using Facebook (or for that matter, by being alive in a space where an advertisement is posted). But we don't want it to be too obvious, or we get mad.

"Would you prefer a world in which we are having our emotions manipulated, but where the manipulators ignore the consequences of their own actions?" Watts asked. But to whose benefit?

A divide is growing between the people who wholeheartedly embrace a radically new, radically self-centred vision of human life, and the people who do not. The internal lives of the tech elite, centred on the labour-saving innovations of Silicon Valley, are at odds with semi-atavistic conceptions of how people interact. Traditions and shared values are redundant, inefficient, and must be optimised out of existence.

The backlash against this world is democracy manifesting itself; a tacit rejection of the ideological assumptions underpinning the personal tech revolution. People want to define the structure of their own lives, and Silicon Valley's myriad product lines are an unwelcome intrusion into the way we live and interact with one another – and even the way we eat, sleep and procreate.

A simple fact remains: there is something intrinsically repellant about a world in which our food, jobs and personal relationships are replaced by digital proxies in the name of ultra-efficient disruption. The geeks, with their ready willingness to abandon social norms, are pulling us toward a utopia nobody wants.