Psychoanalysis in reverse

At Cybershow we are recently inundated with requests from guests wanting to speak about burnout and feeling "crazy" in cybersecurity and development. We've also spoken to teachers at all levels of education who say computing is destroying school and driving everyone insane. This is part of a wider pattern of concerns across society that we're noticing. Technology is turning us all mad. We've known this for a long time.

If this problem were limited to commercial coders and system administrators it would, personal sympathies aside, feel okay to chalk it up to "market forces" and move along. Commercial tech is over-reaching, putting too much strain on its workers and its customers, and so reaping the consequences. In economics or systems-speak this is normal negative feedback, providing necessary limitation. Workers getting sick fits perfectly into the capitalist credo of adaptation to expressed demand. Workers that burn out and stop producing are simply expressing demand for more leisure.

In a less ambitious technological society this would be a minority problem, for a small cadre of engineers and elite scientists. Indeed we see this with massive burnout and mental health issues in the science and technology sector. Presently computer scientists and cybersecurity people are burning out at a terrifying pace.

When Stalin faced the problem of disaffected engineers he simply had all the Bourgeois Engineers rounded up and sent off to Siberia or shot. Surplus people who know how everything works - and could build a viable alternative - are a great threat once policy starts down the slippery road to totalitarianism.

That's why even as colossal cybersecurity disasters happen daily, as Marks and Spencer, Co-Op, Land Rover and the NHS suffer crippling attacks, nobody is hiring new cybersecurity people. There is plenty hot air about it. Governments claim we desperately need more cyber people, and must train them fast. The mass-media apes this message, since fear sells.

In reality, outside a handful of universities there is no credible cybersecurity education happening. Most of it is product specific and thinly veiled sales material for companies like Microsoft or Cisco. As I've witnessed myself, even if there were, nobody hires graduates into fitting cyber roles. They end up using their skills to become cybercriminals. That's where the money is. Meanwhile industry and "capital" is "investing in AI" to bring automated security to systems. Everyone with an IQ that is a positive integer knows where this is going to end.

But we cannot draw such a line and hope that "only a corrupt tech industry collapses". Technology carries its values with it. If I design a deceptive application or add backdoors to an operating system I spread mistrust and paranoia into society. Madness from within the technology industry has been spreading, infecting the whole world and making all of society sick. It should now be clear to most of us that undesirable and dangerous human values have spread from a tiny Silicon Valley clique with questionable morals and character. To call this creed "technofascism" is no longer hyperbole.

Much of this is "accepted as normal". But that status is itself the result of relentless propaganda to 'normalise' deep discomfort. The claim that "Everybody is doing X" or "Everyone accepts that… " is always dubious if not mischievous. Yet it is hard to find any passage of prose in either the mass media or scientific journals that does not begin with sycophantic tugging of forelocks and doffing of caps to our masters. Tech-apologetic is mandatory boilerplate as preface to any "credible" commentary.

It is becoming clear this is far, far from anything sane, regular people will continue to accept. A painful adjustment is afoot and not a moment too soon. On the surface are the familiar practical and utility arguments against the present digital misadventure. Vast swathes of 'consumer' technology is stupefying, morally injurious, time wasting, not to mention very bad for the environment and completely unnecessary. However, beneath the visible and measurable harms lie far deeper and more worrying effects on democracy, education and social relations which are deteriorating as a consequence of derelict technological values. As Ursula Franklin noted, when values lead technology great things are possible, but if technology leads values then disaster is not far away.

Psychoanalysis is the exploration of unconscious processes, through art, science and literature as well as a method of treatment or therapy. Psychotherapy informed by psychoanalysis aims to explore the unconscious to alleviate emotional and mental suffering, increase a persons reflective functioning and ability to mentalise, and increase ability to self regulate. To do this it must make the unconscious conscious.

Part of a wider canopy of "psychology" - science of mind - psychoanalysis deals with our emotional mind, with feelings, goals, self-images, life journeys, social relations, hopes, grief, change and becoming. Though it operates one individual at a time, it has broader societal impact than cognitive science and neuroscience which also attempt to discover the way minds work. It is relational and situational, having broad overlap with social sciences, philosophy, and political science.

This breadth allows for a healthy spread of interpretation of "madness" or malfunction; as organic, or developmental, systemic, or based in trauma. However, all tribes of psyche diagnose one problem in common: Undesirable feelings! Beyond mere folly or eccentricity madness means suffering.

Increasingly psychotherapists and their colleagues in psychiatry (prescribing physicians) see their consulting rooms filled with people who can no longer cope with the "technological society". Anxiety about dependency, random outages, addiction, work pressure, gas-lighting, stalking, surveillance, treachery, disinformation, duplicity and domination ooze from every bit of "consumer technology". We are at once stuck to our smartphones yet disgusted by them and all they stand for.

Those who carve out a refuge of sanity, by non-participation, slower living, or alternative technologies - even under instructions from their GP - are pressured, mocked as Luddites and "reactionaries" by those of us who fear emulating their courage, innovation and willpower. This is exacerbated by myopic Western governments who have pinned all of their economic hopes on "technological dominance" - a regressive school-boyish war footing and blinding hangover from the Cold War.

As in social circles of drug addicts and alcoholics, the afflicted feel jealousy and rage at those who dare to break free. Those who self-care and seek improved mental health by reducing technology are treated with hostility. One most bizarre thing I've heard said to someone (who like myself does not own a smartphone) is; "Well it's okay for you, but I don't have the luxury of not having a smartphone".

Think about that for a moment. A smartphone is a luxury good, costing many hundreds or thousands of pounds. Each carries a massive environmental impact. For someone to claim that not having one is a "luxury" shows something has gone very, very deeply wrong with our society, culture and outlook. It is the same faux defence of those who say "I don't have the luxury or not owning a car" while living in a city with excellent public transport.

What is behind this twisted and resentful martyrdom? A strange manifestation of guilt? Identification with technology? Self-hatred at ones own hopelessness? Some vestige of a deformed protestant work ethic? Timid obedience to some death cult?

All this points to a serious, real worry: the impossibility of maintaining a technological society at all. The 20th century was a story of ambitious engineers enthusiastically building a new world on the rising tide of booming economies. The 21st century could hardly have a more different mood. The legacy of our brutal and now faded empires, of slavery, planetary destruction, and the declining population and relevance of Western ideals stings like salt. But it is nothing compared to the passive, frozen horror of watching machines build machines, machines destroy machines, and feeling irrelevant and helpless as human beings. As Einstein predicted our technology has completely outrun our ability to manage it. New forms of "management" will undoubtedly emerge.

The world is buzzing with a new phrase; "Digital Sovereignty". At last perhaps humankind is waking to the dangers of abject surrender to technology made by other people of dubious honour. Sovereignty begins with the individual. Sovereignty starts with choice. For all the bluster coming from Europe about "Digital Sovereignty" we've yet to see that killer investment in Free Software and mass media messaging about BSD and Linux necessary to shrug-off toxic US BigTech.

Meanwhile China, India and Russia seem to be going their own way quite nicely, not toward any democratic ideal of course. This "splinternet" marks the end of old hopes for "spreading democracy" via technology. More likely we will end up importing fascist, authoritarian values from our notional enemies.

What makes our technology tragic is that at the very moment it is bearing some of its long promised fruits we are experiencing the death of technology as an ideal. This is not because technology is mad, bad or monstrous, but because people behind it are. The old pro-democracy and egalitarian orders of technology have been swept away, replaced by the likes of Elon Musk, Larry Ellison and Eric Schmidt who are openly authoritarian and celebrate suffering caused by their technology. Politics is dominated by people who are either profoundly ignorant of technology or opportunist imposters like Rishi Sunak and Nick Clegg who ride the coat-tails of BigTech.

That's what "AI" is really all about; the ruling class anticipating a breakdown of labour capable of running their money machines and so going all-in on total automation before generational knowledge collapse. Or more likely, before a well enough coordinated global industrial movement by technology workers takes back control of tech. "AI" in this role, as an anti-enlightenment and anti-humanist force, exacerbates almost every other factor against sustainable technological society.

The "elites" (incumbent investment) have decided we can have a technological society one and only way - their way - or we won't be "allowed" a technological society at all. While hiding behind the veil of "free markets" and "liberalism" their model of technology is totalitarian command and control - little different from Soviet era folly. The real project here, as evidenced by the jaw-dropping hypocrisy of corporations that defend tooth and nail "intellectual property" while aggressively plagiarising the work of artists to train their machines to supplant those artists, is what L. M. Sacasas dubs the "Enclosure of the Human Psyche" (The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 13). Psychoanalysis suggests that effective resistance against "AI" can only occur with a wider recognition and rejection of greed-driven toxic industrialised technology in general. The unconscious agendas of technology must be made conscious.

Eventually of course history, if not the Law, will rub the noses of these common thieves in the mud. No extractive totalitarian regimes have ever survived more than a decade or two. Meanwhile we suffer the debasement of science and a perversion of technology, changing every well-meant effort from an empowering tool into weapons of suppression and exploitation. At a time when humans most desperately need a revolution in education and coordinated, benevolent scientific endeavour, we are squandering all our resources and goodwill on insane megalomaniac ideas and a descent back into petty nationalism.

Will future archaeologists look back at the peak of human civilisation and conclude that; at the critical cusp of survival or collapse human achievement amounted to Uber Eats and AirBnB?

Capital is infinitely chameleon. Like the ego itself, as soon as it is spotted, called-out, named, it transforms so as to escape scrutiny. Having extracted from almost every aspect of human life and brought technology to the brink of self-destruction, some ruse was needed by the industry to save itself.

We must therefore recognise that "AI" is not really a technological advance so much as the general re-branding of all digital technologies in a fresh political frame to accelerate a wealthy few into what feels like safe harbour.

Most of what it touches is made worse. Using education as an example again, already undermined by capital for 30 years, "AI" simply throws fuel on the bonfire of pedagogy and research necessary to sustain a functioning technological society. At this point technology is attacking itself.

Because almost everybody now works with technology in some way - because we have so aggressively forced it upon people - widespread mental malaise is not limited to over-worked engineers. Young mums seem perpetually enraged at the "stupid app" their kid's school asks them to use. Retirees cannot park their cars or shop on the high-street. And so it goes, everywhere, across age and social class. We cannot possibly pretend we are happy with our technology, and those that wheel out "early cancer diagnosis" and "Internet for everyone" as counter-argument know they are being disingenuous in their deliberate poverty of scope.

Technology also creates madness because if it delivers on any of its "convenience" promises at all it simultaneously threatens to take these away randomly at any moment. What is left is a feeling of precarious existence, psychological insecurity. What use is miraculous medical intervention if you cannot afford it, or if it is "unavailable" due to this or that technical failure. Advancing technologies within economies already in managed decline has a doubly divisive effect.

Growing up in the 1970s I experienced the "Three Day Week" then the "Winter of Discontent" when the electricity grid went off regularly in Britain. Those were not traumatic times but happy, exciting and educational, as we learned about oil lamps, candles, hand-operated generators and saving energy. As a very young child, aged about 4 or 5, I knew how to wire a battery to a light-bulb, charge a battery, why heat and lighting use different amounts of current, why kerosene is dangerous and how to pour it safely… how to light a match.

Now I'm not suggesting we should all give our toddlers matches. At least not literally. But I think for myself childhood provided a solid foundation to hold technology in its proper place, as something that is fallible but also something that we can control and so it's failure is not catastrophic.

So, in fact in many ways I am a sceptic of hand-wringing "technological collapse" theories and doom sayers. Perhaps the greatest irony and fitting insult to everything we have built in the past half-century would be when some event destroys every digital system on Earth and people just shrug and carry on. "So, what's next?" they'll say, as they throw now useless smartphones into the trash.

The real shock may not be how much we depend on technology, but how much we actually don't.

Another puzzling viewpoint, for me as a scientist and engineer, is of technology as a "given", or otherly "thing in the world" rather than something we at least co-create. I've spent most of my life designing and making the things I need - and which other people now take for granted - whether as computer hardware, code or online services. As a professor I've taught thousands of others to do the same. I am dismayed that most school children have never held a soldering iron or wired even the simplest circuit. Hearing other teachers scoff ignorantly that "writing code is obsolete" is as terrifying as it is maddening.

"The fish rots from the head", says an old Chinese verse. So we should not look at crappy consumer software as a cause of ills, or intervene with parochial regulation and measures to stop lateral decline. Instead we must look at why our political representatives are clueless about technology and society, why higher education is eviscerated and computer science is no longer valued. What does it say that amongst founders only Bezos and Musk have any STEM degree whereas Gates, Zuckerberg, Dell, and Dorsey all dropped out of technical university before bachelors level. Does this reveal a cavalier attitude toward correctness and technical understanding? While I appreciate few people can claim the same experiences and command over computers and electronics as myself, I nevertheless feel it is rather obvious why technology is driving ordinary people to the edge of madness.

For centuries thinkers have understood that no culture exists separately from its technology. Inventions are an expression of the dominant ideas in any time, noble aspirations as well as madness. If the creation is itself MAD (as with the invention of the Atomic Bomb bringing a paradigm of Mutually Assured Destruction), then the people it touches will end up mad too. Of course this supposes that one could build "sane" technology, a hope I sincerely cling to.

As Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan each said in slightly different ways; one cannot drop the printing press into the middle of fifteenth century Europe and come back a few years later to find "Europe plus printing". Instead there is a whole New Europe.

Likewise we cannot return to a world of computing into which we've introduced the promise of "AI" and find everyone still using smartphones and tablets in the old way. Interaction with pseudo-personalities, with 'fake humans' is a step that fundamentally re-frames human relations with computing, knowledge and authority.

A good computer program is a Heideggerian work of art. It captures the latent desires of the folk, epitomises, and crystallises them in code. It 'shines' as an exemplar of how we best arrange algorithms, data-structures and communications protocols to frame two imaginary things - a problem and a solution - arising from a Hegelian (dialectical) tension.

Neither really exist, but together form an expression of how we collectively see the world, how we define "progress" against a pre-established grid of extant "technical challenges".

However two visions are diverging. The "official" one presented to us by leaders and industrialists is getting further and further from the technological ideal of effortless, peaceful, humane existence the majority of real people hold. Any contribution we make to the former is by accident, deception or by force.

This divergent context is defined by earlier decisions, but is essentially arbitrary. Any small perturbation in earlier history would lead to vastly different technologies today. This is to be contrasted with authoritarian theories that cast science and technology as deterministic courses revealing immutable truths. This latter interpretation is the basis of weak apologetic and moral ambiguity, as when people say "If I didn't do this awful thing, someone else would". Technological determinism is also the bankrupt philosophical basis for making claims about what is "inevitable" or "unavoidable", by cocksure pseudo-scientific "technology pundits".

It behoves any intelligent, free-thinking person to examine the almost totally encompassing mythology that now surrounds digital technology. We are constantly told that it has "advanced" exponentially and beyond all recognition… as general capability. That is not true.

In fact there are very few "big ideas". There are perhaps ten or twenty paradigmatic computer programs, of which all others are derivatives. The text editor. The chat application. The database. The spreadsheet. The CAD/CAM environment and associated renderers that make first person 3D games possible. Beyond the four primary capabilities of the digital computer; storage, communication, processing and control, everything else is a design detail in an industry that's barely changed in 40 years despite getting millions of times faster and smaller while doing the same things.

What has advanced over the past 40 years is not work related productivity but control and surveillance. Outside of Free Open Source software which operates on quite different incentives, almost all advances in commercial technology extend the power of the software designer and supplier, generally at the expense of the end user.

The business model of commercial software changed from adding value as productivity to extracting data and enacting remote control at the behest of other interests. These "other interests" are the real customers of commercial surveillance services that dress up in the clothing of "software suppliers" like Google and Microsoft.

Another noticeable change in technology concerns our hopes and aspirations, and our attitudes toward the effect of technology on society and environment. We elevate "progress" with superstitious zeal, as a new religion. We seldom if ever reflect on "progress towards what?" and "for whose benefit?". Like all mass religions it demands new rituals and sacrifices. It is irrational. It requires the suspension of critical reasoning and docile acquiescence to its claims.

I would not be the first person to point out the extraordinary parallels between consumer technology and the illegal drugs industry. Not least of all the use of the term "users" and the prevailing attitudes toward dependency, addiction and harm.

Ursula Franklin identified several distinct stages all technologies pass through. First comes a set of practices designed to secure acceptance (I've written here about some of the more creative and oblique processes to build popular assent). Tech evangelism by gushing "first adopters", paid influencers, and Hollywood all play a part in preparing the ground. Imaginary "problems" must be created to which technologies are a "solution".

Here in Britain fear-mongering about immigration is once again the political smokescreen behind a push for "digital IDs" (of which we already have about five; passports, driving licences, national insurance, NHS numbers and a more or less mandatory phone number). If previous British IT projects are any guide it will almost certainly be an abortive financial black-hole of crony-capitalist corruption which the next government will be forced to scrap.

Indeed when it comes to proselytism even the World Council of Churches strongly disapproves of coercion, bribery or other unjust practices that "violate the conscience of the human person", and here tech qua religion must bow its head in shame. Lies and backroom deals with governments by aggressive and hegemonic organisations like Meta, Microsoft and Amazon are the real story to how we ended up in the security mess we're now in. For mutual surveillance benefits cybersecurity has been deliberately weakened by industry-government collusion. We're now amidst a global cybercrime epidemic as subverted and substandard software fails on a massive scale.

It seems that around technology, industry and governments quite instinctively, systematically mislead and misrepresent;

• the benefits: (to whom?)
• the risks: (security, privacy etc)
• the costs: (to society, culture, health)
• the goals: (no long-term political or social plan)

In no sense is prevalence of BigTech brands simply the "choice of markets" though it is the still widely-held narrative that their products are widespread because they are 'good'. Such "consumer" technology is cloaked in a fluffy pink outfit of "convenience", beyond which very few people see. We accept technology that is opaque and camouflaged because we really have no idea what it is, or what it's costing our future.

In its wider sense as social control apparatus and capitalist machinery, technology is sometimes associated with a mythical beast of child sacrifice, the Moloch. Digital technology has become a sacrificial altar before which we lay our children. We don't want them to be "left behind".

In previous centuries child labour fuelled the industrial revolution in "dark satanic mills" before Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen saw clearly the sacrifice of a whole generation of young men to the beast of industrial, mechanised warfare.

We are all in some way crushed by the wheels of industry. But there is a vast difference between acknowledging industrial injury or resource conflict as unfortunate side-effects of progress and a positive eagerness to wet the soil with blood in what Neil Postman dubbed "abject surrender before technology". Yet such sentiments are there for all to hear in the language of Larry Ellison and Eric Schmidt who seem not content with human progress so much as aroused by technological terror.

Thus another quasi-religious side of tech entreats us to offer up our children before it. School is where this techno-grooming begins. Though computing in schools had started innocently enough as programmes of digital literacy, it quickly moved from "A computer in every school" to "Computers in every classroom for all children in all subjects". Today studies back up the earlier alarm by far-sighted educators like Gatto and Robinson that computers in schools are counter-educational.

Free enterprise capitalist policies of the Thatcher-Reagan era aimed to increase national "competitiveness". But ultimately the technology drive in schools became totalitarian and counter-educational. Initially it made sense as an "information retrieval" advance and was limited to libraries. However, education is more than information access. Industry saw that computing must somehow be shoehorned into every school activity and "Edutech" was born. As a veteran of 30 plus years in education, and a contributor to educational technology conferences, the least I can say is that there remains dubious scientific evidence of the overall benefit of computing in primary and secondary education other than to teach computing itself.

Tech replaces innovation and creativity with compliance. It nullifies critical thinking. It turns curious compassionate young minds into anxious performing monkeys in a cruel laboratory. Nothing turns young people off technology more than being beaten and imprisoned by it. Rooted in the Prussian military system of compulsory education, measurement, hierarchy, drilling, and discipline, the Western school system has become a callous and abusive vassal to US American technology companies. Some teachers remain not just blissfully ignorant but "proud" to teach in a "Google Academy" or "Microsoft Academy" in which the lives of pupils are turned over to monitoring, judgement and influence of foreign technological powers.

The success or failure of young people today is pitched as depending entirely on their ability to be "technology whizz kids". If they cannot "compete" (in self-demeaning abandonment of personal dignity) with more adept and "intelligent" peers they will be "left behind". It is here, in obtaining surrender to technology, that some of the most profound psychological damage is done to young people, which must later be undone by expensive mental-health interventions and therapy. What results has techno-abuse achieved? Despite it all we have fallen far behind other countries in technology.

If there is one solid thing that we are undoubtedly teaching young people today it is how to cheat machines. Machines now stand in for "society". So, we are creating a generation of natural hackers who understand that lying, cheating, plagiarising, and delegating work is the road to survival, and that there is no moral injury because no humans are involved. Self advancement, even by criminal means is morally okay, because there are "no victims".

The unexpected and perhaps counter-intuitive negative effects of computing on education is just one aspect of a bigger picture of side effects. Although hardly a "scientific" way of saying it, technology corrodes our souls.

Freud and Jung, along with Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes, saw civilisation as a "thin veneer", where the benefits to society of reflective analysis and knowledge of human psychology are very fragile. Like trust, they are hard won and easily destroyed. Machines, and particularly systems that try to mediate trust, assume authority, emulate feeling and sensibility, or make critical moral decisions are not "infrastructure" but corrosives to that fragile balance. Their introduction is almost guaranteed to tear society to pieces, and I think everybody knows that even if they are reluctant to say so.

At the centre of the current "AI" hype movement are large language models, chat-bots based on Jozef Weizenbaum's initial Eliza chat project ("ELIZA a computer program for the study of natural language" ACM, Volume 9, Issue 1), But that was itself a parody of Rogerian therapy. The program was essentially a joke. It was only noticed by mainstream computer science because of the side notes regarding the unexpectedly strong reaction of Weizenbaum's secretary. He claimed to have unearthed worrying evidence that "Extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people." Weizenbaum himself became a vocal critic of AI's implications and its casual, giddy and unstructured development.

"AI", for all the remarkable and entertaining properties of Markov chains and high dimensional "transformers", offers nothing of much benefit for ordinary people. That is not to say it offers no utility in the right hands, of scientists working in already advanced domains like digital signal processing and according to a socially acceptable and approved agendas. But there is no common problem to which "AI" is a solution, at least none that cannot already be solved by less egregious and costly technologies.

Theodore Adorno famously describes fractured, industrial forms of modernity as "psychoanalysis in reverse". Adorno identifies this trend not only with a kind of nihilism, banality or nullification of thought, but also with Fascist propaganda. Postman's thesis, as a digestible McNugget, claims; television created an illiterate world devoid of the power of language, a regress to the world of spectacle, awe and icons. "AI" is quite spectacular, especially to people whose literacy has precipitously fallen. The Internet accelerated both these effects times ten. Our attention span dropped from hours to minutes, then from minutes to mere seconds.

In this century we have taken most of the intellectual advances made in the previous, advances toward peace and prosperity ¹, and set them on fire. There is now an ominous nostalgia for the violence of the mid 20th century and, at least in the United States, a celebration of all the forces of inequality and frustration that lead to it.

We've taken our understanding of the worst parts of human psychology, the root causes of domination and totalitarian regimes, and enshrined them in technology as dark-patterns, ubiquitous surveillance, systems of control and exploitation. Technology made by those monstrous individuals of Silicon Valley in the 21st century is a litany of regression. We're moving backwards at a hell of a pace towards Medieval fiefdoms and serfdom.

Compounding this, so-called "AI" creates a world without reflection, without provenance, irony, tragedy, or any real meaning. Everything becomes a soup of bare half-facticity, without deeper meaning. "AI" destroys the emotional world of which psychotherapy is the subject.

The "information age" implied some kind of promise that "information" would have utility. That it would inform. Instead, information is now merely instrumental, having use only in the moment to satisfy this or that communicative urge; To write a shallow half-sincere love letter to some "entity" that may or may not even be human, a eulogy for a dead man we never knew, a job application for a job we don't really want, a shopping list of things we don't need, all with equal lack of human meaning, each disposable.

Digital technology made in the USA, as "social media" and so on, exacerbates all those conditions that psychotherapists seek to free suffering patients from; loneliness, jealousy, low esteem, demotivation, lack of purpose, anomie, alienation… The rise of social media and smartphones is concomitant with plunging mental health and general unhappiness. Social media plus "AI" appears to be the perfect poison for vulnerable human minds (all of us).

Human values philosopher Rick Roderick noted that whereas psychoanalysis aims to make the complex, unreflected parts of us legible, the opposite project aims to make the parts of us that think into ones that don't. We only "react, follow, or replicate". This is the "dream" of techno-utopians - a world free of suffering not because there is less sadistic cruelty, arbitrary loss and tragedy, but because we've erased the capacity to feel these emotions and the language to describe them. Sadists and sociopaths would have free reign.

Dan McQuillan author of "Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence" (2022 Bristol Univ. Press.) thinks so too, describing the essence of "AI" as "thoughtlessness". McQuillan puts forward a familiar epistemological argument that this thoughtless way of seeing the world shapes society in truly awful ways.

So long as people remain thoughtless and inarticulate, unable to express horror at the technology unfolding and enveloping them, their madness along with horrible, inexplicable acts of violence or suicide will continue to accelerate.

Erich Fromm said that sanity is measured by the smallest distance between a persons fantasy of themselves and their reality. Sanity is accurate and reasonable self knowledge. Insanity lies in a schism maintained to temporarily avoid dissonance.

Most people feel they "should" advocate technological "progress" as a morally unassailable good. Placed beside their actual experience of harms and disruption this creates an almost unbearable tension.

"AI" inflicts a profound moral injury. Technology is widening the distance between multiple worlds; the world we pretend to inhabit, the world we wish we lived in, and the one we actually live in. A narcissistic mirror of "AI" flatters our self-delusions and tells a sanitised, sweetened version of our situation. The absurdity and indeed impossibility of integrating a corporate (capital) world view, drenched in self-deception and bullshit into ordinary existence is now psychologically untenable for mentally healthy people. Enough at least for Dan Erickson's TV show Severance to be very successful because of its resonance, bringing a popular understanding of splitting and dissociative identity disorder as responses to stress, and hopefully illuminating the modern "technology as work" situation as a psychosis.

The solution in Erickson's fictional story is radical surgery and drugs to split the minds of workers. In reality, long before we get there, much of the population are already on powerful psychoactive drugs in order to cope with the technological demands of capitalism. The breakthrough for many patients in therapy is realising that they don't need to cope - that all the coping mechanisms are harms in themselves. Wellness is a revolution of lowered expectations, letting go of impossible ambition and the return to a world where simpler technologies work with people, not against us. The question is, can humanity have a grown-up conversation about technology before the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater.