What technology takes from us – and how to take it back

The solution to technology is not more technology. The solution to loneliness is each other, a wealth that should be available to most of us most of the time. We need to rebuild or reinvent the ways and places in which we meet; we need to recognise them as the space of democracy, of joy, of connection, of love, of trust. Technology has stolen us from each other and in many ways from ourselves, and then tried to sell us substitutes.

I spent the weekend attending my town's annual summer festival. It was a ton of fun, but it was packed to the gills with people, a natural consequence of our town's explosive growth over the past decade.

That growth has manifested as mcmansions that are packed together like sardines, distribution warehouses for mega corporations, and data centers for notorious champions of privacy and democracy.

Our town has courted new gyms and a couple restaurants, but I'd love to start seeing us actively recruit entrepreneurs who want to provide additional opportunities for us to come together and commune. You know, things like new dining options, shopping centers, theaters, arcades, churches, pickleball venues! Hell, why not a Puttshack?

Maybe I need to find a way to buy that open parcel of land that's a couple blocks from my house and build a coffee shop on it.

We are told that machines will become like us, but in many ways they demand we become more like them. To let that happen is to lose something immeasurably valuable. That immeasurability is what makes this struggle difficult, but what cannot be measured can be described or at least evoked and valued. It cannot be boiled down to simple metrics such as efficiency and profitability.

Resisting the annexation of our hearts and minds by Silicon Valley requires us not just to set boundaries on our engagement with what they offer, but to cherish the alternatives. Joy in ordinary things, in each other, in embodied life, and the language with which to value it, is essential to this resistance, which is resistance to dehumanisation.