For a long time, technology has played an obvious role in our lives. As the state of the art has advanced, technological progress has had a pronounced effect on the world: pollution, overpopulation, extreme class disparity. There’s a more insidious effect, prefigured by Wordsworth two hundred years ago: “Little we see in Nature that is ours; / We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

The big picture problems are more than bothersome, of course, but technology’s “sordid boon” seems like it could be even worse, because of its subtlety. There has been recently a myriad of stories that make me think that technology, defined contingently as the consumer-facing fruit of certain leading companies, has inserted itself into our lives in such a way as to be more important, and by extension more desirable for abuse, than ever before. This combination of inconspicuousness and importance makes even salutary advances, if they remain unremarked upon, an area open to exploitation. Companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google perform fabulous feats and offer incredible products. Their ubiquity in the market means that they shape people’s existence as much as the government, family, and the larger cultural atmosphere. Maybe more than all those, and that’s fine. A lot of institutions have more power to shape people’s existence than the government. But very few do so under the guise of an ineradicable push to progress, with a real Law (cf, Moore) held up as describing its inexorable growth. And few institutions shape the course of humanity with humanity itself’s unquenchable approbation. This is a serious problem.

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