The Status Quo is Dead, Long Live The Status Quo

January 2024

Philosophy

The final part of a series on identity, technology and individualism.

Technology enables individualism. This is usually presented as unambiguously good — more freedom, more self-expression, more ability to construct your own identity outside the constraints of whatever community you were born into. And there's something to it. The ability to find your people online, to access information that was previously gatekept, to build an audience for whatever niche thing you care about: these are real gains.

But technology enables individualism and individualism pays technology back with interest. The more personalised your media environment, the more you optimise your digital life around the self you've constructed, the more that self becomes dependent on the technological infrastructure maintaining it. The platform doesn't just reflect who you are — it participates in producing who you are.

This creates a paradox that's worth sitting with. The same systems that promise liberation — from tradition, from geographical constraint, from inherited identity — are the systems that capture and monetise the resulting freedom. You get to be whoever you want to be, as long as whoever you want to be is someone who generates engagement and data.

The criticism of tech companies and their executives tends to land at the level of individuals. Sam Altman is doing this. Zuckerberg wants that. The implicit argument is that replacing these people, or regulating these companies, would change the outcome. But the structure of the incentive system would remain identical. A different person at the top of the same machine produces the same machine.

This is why focusing criticism on individuals is actually a defence of the system. By personalising the problem, we avoid asking what produced the problem. The question isn't why Sam Altman makes the choices he makes — it's what kind of arrangement makes those choices nearly inevitable for whoever sits in that role.

As AI gets more capable of personalisation, the gap between what people think they freely choose and what has been optimised for them will continue to narrow. The endpoint of hyper-personalisation is a world where every individual experience feels uniquely tailored, and where the aggregate of all those experiences becomes more homogenous than any standardised culture ever managed to be.

Because if everyone's reality is optimised for engagement, and engagement responds to the same psychological architecture in every human brain, then everyone's uniquely personalised reality will look more similar, not less.

This is the joke. The status quo that promised to die — the standardised, conformist culture of the 20th century — has been replaced by a new status quo that maintains exactly the same power relationships while offering each participant the private experience of rebellion.

You can't just leave. But you can at least see it.