A More Brittle World

It is the thesis of this chapter, building on what we have observed regarding the characterCharacter of technology, that this increasing vulnerability is not an unfortunate by-product, but rather inherent in the character of a technological society in which attachment and devotion to the machine has replaced attachment and devotion to living, breathing fellow citizens and life in general. The brittleness of the technological society, which many have noticed but not yet factored into its costs and benefits—its externalitiesExternalities—is an institutional choice, obscured by the short-term thinking of contemporary society, specifically in the West. We suggest the common technological thread of all of this is a tight couplingTight coupling, situations where components in a system are highly dependent on each other. Facebook’sFacebook algorithms Algorithms do not give the user “here’s another viewpoint to consider.” Rather, the algorithms are tuned to elicit arousal, the strongest, usually negative reaction. We know how to create systems that are more reliable and less brittle yet have chosen as a matter of policy and commercial expedience to live in a more brittle vulnerable world.