I disagree that there's a technological solution to late stage capitalism and the slow death of liberal democracy.

New technology doesn't change anything about social institutions - the most powerful groups before the technology was invented simply own the technology after it's invented and use it to further cement their power.

I think the luddites were on to something. We don't need technology, we need humans doing things a little differently, maybe even doing bizarre things like setting factories on fire. Personally I hope we can try other things before setting factories on fire, see Keith McHenry's version of The Anarchist Cookbook for peaceful resistance solutions as well.

The point is though without a restructure, new technology doesn't liberate, in fact it further entrenches existing power structures.

> New technology doesn't change anything about social institutions

This is of course demonstrably untrue. Marshall McLuhan devoted his life to illuminating how technology changes society. The printing press, radio, television and the Internet have all undoubtedly changed our social institutions. It's hard to imagine secular democracy ever becoming a thing if we hadn't been able to mass produce books and newspapers, and writing manuscripts had remained mostly under the control of the Church. It seems less probable that the Nazis would have come to power if not for the immense skill Goebbels and Hitler had in the use of radio. And I doubt Trump would have been elected if he hadn't known how to press people's buttons so well on social media.

Let's not forget that more ancient things like fire, agriculture and accounting are also technology that irrevocably changed humanity and put new people in power. Or take a look at how railroads remade American society. Or how sufficiently advanced sailboats placed half the world under the thrall of colonialism...

Absolutely there can exist technologies which are anti-democracy, and surveillance technologies are exactly that. You become afraid to say or write the wrong thing in public, and then to say or write it in private, and then to even think it, and finally the thing is forgotten. I felt like Orwell made the point well enough in 1984.

All that said I don't see technology saving us from our current problems, it needs to be invented, it needs to mature, there needs to be adoption. One might imagine mesh networking and censorship proof distributed messaging or something having an influence on society but we simply aren't there yet.

> You become afraid to say or write the wrong thing in public, and then to say or write it in private

It's called "social cooling": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363

> but we simply aren't there yet

Actually, I2P is already here. It should be promoted more.

I didn't use the right word, maybe you can help me pick a better one. You are of course correct that technology has many times completely changed our societies, but my point is that despite overwhelming transformations, the core of societal organization doesn't change: those with capital control those without. Those with capital determine what labor those without may do, when, where, and what becomes of the result of that labor.

The printing press resulted in the first ultrapowerful media companies that were able to capitalize on later revolutionary technologies such as radio and television (for those nimble enough to keep up with the times). Even in that era the newspaper was leveraged to serve the needs of the wealthy and solidify their power. Countless unpublished books that couldn't get picked up by the publishing houses. And the end game of those media technologies is Rupert Murdoch, Disney.

You are right, power shifted from the church to other Capital holders. And the laborers continued to labor at the whim of some new master.

Railroads led to Standard Oil and America's first ultra powerful monopolies, laying rail to serve their needs (or wasting rail to suck money from the government) rather than the needs of the people.

Sailboats created the East Indian trading company and actual corpotocracies, as you said.

Incredible changes to society in so many ways except perhaps the most important, and that's my point: it won't be technology in the end. It wasn't technology that led to the syndicalization of pre Franco Spain, or the revolutions in Russia and the ROC, or the development of the Paris commune, events that signify some of the few brief times in our history that the core paradigm was shifted if only briefly.

We are totally talking about a technology-driven shift in who controls society though. In the past it was kings and the church and their wealth was certainly a factor but the king's direct control over the state monopoly on violence, and by extension over land, and the church's control over information and belief, were the greater factors. Remember all these kings started out mostly as thugs with bands of other thugs behind them who had the biggest weapons and the most violent tendencies. And the churches started out as smaller dudes who were willing to eat mushrooms, wear face paint, and tell stories about how the biggest thug in the pack was the son of a god so you had better obey him.

Now, because of technology shifts, it's the political/bureaucratic and merchant classes in charge. The king and the church are pretty much powerless. The military class has gone both ways depending on what country we're discussing. In some their growing ability to commit mass killing has given them dictatorship powers. In others they are relatively defanged by the political/merchant classes.

Wealth is a very interesting thing because it was originally a byproduct of power. The king sent soldiers to collect taxes. The church propagandized you into tithing. Now the relationship is inverted and the wealth creates the power. Silicon Valley spends $140M on lobbying to get the legislative outcomes they want.

IMO the more we zoom in to shorter spans of time the less we see technology toppling an entire class of elites in favor of another. It doesn't happen in 30 years. It takes hundreds. That said, technology seems to just keep on moving faster, so I wouldn't discount it playing a bigger role in the future than it did in the past.

>I felt like Orwell made the point well enough in 1984.

True enough. Although I think Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth came closer to our current situation with The Space Merchants[0] (which I just read, almost by accident).

Orwell was more explicit in his exposition of totalitarianism and told a more compelling story than Pohl/Kornbluth did in their tale of authoritarian/corporatist dystopia.

That said, the universe of The Space Merchants more closely matches the current environment, IMHO.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants

That looks like a great book, I'll have to check it out!

My go-to in fiction for comparison with the authoritarianism of the modern world is actually Brave New World. We were drugged (whether pharmacologically or psychologically) into submission, more than we were beaten into it.

1984 is great however for getting the surveillance point across in the most brutally direct way possible. The telescreen was a mind-bogglingly prescient idea for a guy writing a book in the 1940s. "Omnipresent and almost never turned off, they are an unavoidable source of propaganda and tools of surveillance." We actually did it. We invented and embraced George Orwell's telescreens of 1984, en masse. The only difference is we put them in our pockets and carry them around all day, instead of having them in our living rooms.

>That looks like a great book, I'll have to check it out!

Honestly, I wasn't all that impressed with the novel. The characters were rather two-dimensional and the plot was somewhat muddled.

That said, its depiction of a corporatist/authoritarian society incorporates some of the tropes (rewriting history, mass market influencing/propaganda, redefining "good" and "bad", demonizing the "other" etc.) included in 1984 and Brave New World (BNW), but in a far right wing context. Which, as I mentioned, is more apropos to current circumstance than are the left wing "utopias" depicted in 1984 and BNW.

As such, while I don't discourage you from reading The Space Merchants (or its 1984 sequel, The Merchants' War -- which I haven't read), I'm not saying it's a fabulous piece of literature. Pohl[0][2] has written much better stuff, with similar cynicism but significantly better plotting and character development and takes on technology (cf. Heechee Saga[1] -- which I highly recommend -- and others).

In any case, I agree with your assessment of BNW WRT today, but with a far right wing dystopic bent rather than a far left wing dystopic one -- hence my reference to The Space Mechants.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederik_Pohl

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heechee_Saga

[2] Pohl was, as were many mid 20th century Sci-Fi (and other) authors, alarmed by the rapid population growth after World War II, especially as Malthus[3] was widely read at the time and we had not yet seen the fruits of the widespread agriculture technology deployment of the 20th century (Green Revolution[4]).

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_P...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

Edit: Clarified prose. Added footnotes for more detail.

There is no authoritarian leaning technology. People figured out how to create 1984 while saying they defend free speech.

It is simply that, eventually, people learn how to use technology to their advantage.

There is a small community of billionaires who control everything to the best of their ability. They control for their own benefit.

Technology, its development and production, is one thing that they control.

The rest of the population (the nonbillionaires) is another thing that they seek to control. It's near the top of their list.

Phones, internet and social media are tools for controlling us. Arguably. Right?

I agree with this. And yet.

> It is simply that, eventually, people learn how to use technology to their advantage.

What should we call this accumulation of lessons in how to do things for your benefit? It can be and is encoded as algorithms is it not?