What Makes Game-Changing Technologies Inherently Dangerous

Game-changing technologies create a kind of Anarchy, because the New Game inevitably has no rules.

Anarchy strengthens the power of forces run by the Spirit of the Gangster, the people and groups who will take advantage of whatever opportunities the new Game provides to those who care about nothing but amassing power, no matter the damage to the world.

So the Utopian dream of many as the Internet arose about all the ways the Internet would make the world more wonderful did not include what, for example, the Fascist Force on the American right would do to drive half of America into a politically crazy place.

The Force of Brokenness has gained power in America because of the opportunities the new technology gave them. If Americans still got most of their information from the likes of Walter Cronkite, and Rupert Murdock couldn’t create a FOX News on cable, Donald Trump would not be getting the powers of the Presidency with plans to destroy the good constitutional order of America.

My hunch is that a good portion of the game-changing technologies that human beings have come up with show this destructive pattern of the “New Game” being anarchic.

As societies discover the ways the new technology endanger their values, they attempt to extend their order to eliminate the destructive effects of the initial Anarchy. (Like the Australians with their new law to keep all children under sixteen away from Social Media.)

I don’t know what proportion of game-changing technologies create major dangers of this sort. But I can say with confidence that all of that applies to the most fundamental “New Technology” of all: the food-producing technologies that facilitated humankind’s breakthrough into “Civilization.” (“Civilization” defined as “those societies created by a species that has extricated itself from the niche in which it evolved biologically by inventing its own way of life.)

It began with technologies of control over food sources (gardening, herding, eventually agriculture). It brought about a New Game where these “civilizing” societies were compelled to interact with no rules in place. In other words, “Anarchy.” Anarchy inevitably leads to “a war of all against all” in the interactive system of civilized societies.

That fortifies the Force of Brokenness not only by making the world more nightmarish for the humans living in such a system, but also by mandating that only those societies that can prevail in a “war of all again all” will be able to survive and spread.

Which means that the New Technology of Civilization made it inevitable that civilization would develop in a particular direction that people did not choose but could not avoid: inevitably, there will be a PROCESS OF SELECTION, which mandates that THE WAYS OF POWER will inexorably spread throughout the world of human civilization.

The selection for the WAYS OF POWER — why the Athenians could say that the human world is a place where “the strong do what they CAN, while the weak suffer what they MUST” — means that the EVOLUTION OF CIVILIZATIION will be substantially dictated by a Destructive Force. For it is such a Force that gains power in the world by taking advantage of the absence of good and enforceable rules.

So when the force that has taken over the Republican Party in recent decades seizes the opportunity to use the new technologies to misinform enough people that a human monster like Donald Trump can get elected, this is an example of how the Destructive Force has gained in power in a nation awash in a new technology that cries out for some necessary regulations to protect the good of the society. Likewise, humankind generally is still largely tumbling down the hill of Anarchy, not yet having instituted the rules necessary to keep the Force of Brokenness from having much too great a role in deciding the human future.

We need to employ the best set of rules, with the best set of means of enforcing, to assure that human civilization will not destroy itself — with the brokenness of civilization’s “war of all against all” ultimately leading to a nuclear holocaust, or the brokenness of the human interaction with the biosphere (like the brokenness that prevented humankind from acting responsibly on climate change beginning more than thirty years ago) bringing about planet-wide ecological catastrophe.

Inevitably, humankind’s breaking out of the natural order made it necessary that this new kind of life-form — civilization — develop a new kind of ordering that would make it possible for the Force for Wholeness (which the selection for Life inevitably generates) to call the shots, rather than the Force for Brokenness that inevitably thrives in Anarchy.

At the very least, we should recognize that whenever the Game is Changed, we should be vigilant about problems and looking for the good order that would solve them.