Is the Modern Tech Age A Giant Scam?

It sure feels like it sometimes

Photo by rc.xyz NFT gallery on Unsplash

Do you ever get that feeling that some offer is just too good to be true, or too ridiculous to be real or useful? It is the fundamental goal of scammers to compel you to ignore those sensations and do whatever is proposed—usually give money. For nearly two decades, the tech world has been selling itself in ways that seem awfully similar.

To be clear, I am not a neo-Luddite. Nor am I suggesting that all technical progress in the last 20 years has been specious or faked. I remember how complicated it was to call to or from Nepal back in the early 2000s. Today, I talk to friends there in the same way as when I call my mother who lives just a mile away, and with equal clarity. At a broader level, there have been a plentitude of remarkable achievements: 3-D printing, capsule endoscopy, tokenization, and retinal implants are just some that come to mind.

I suppose that in a society built around the notion that profit is the quintessential goal, any advancement must be monetizable. For example, while something such as quantum computing could help make new discoveries in chemistry, no one will fund its development without the prospect of using it to make and sell new and expensive drugs.

But the tech sector does not seem content with that kind of trade. It requires a long wait for the investment return, an unpalatable condition for shareholders. Thus, to fill those temporal gaps in profiting, companies have elected to throw every piece of excrement at the wall in the hope that plenty sticks.

Pointless Innovation

When it comes to wider consumerism the nature of most “innovative” tech seems, well, rather pointless. Many of the items hawked offer supposedly revolutionary ideas that really don’t make things substantially better for us. The hot item lately is, without doubt, artificial intelligence. Smartphones and search engines all now promote their use of artificial intelligence.

Regarding search engines, the AI simply gives a generic summary that one could easily find by clicking on any of the result links. In the screenshot below, you can see the AI-generated answers to the question: who is Euripides?

They are, to be generous, vacuous summaries that are essentially the same as SEO meta descriptions, which have already long-existed. I suppose it is good that they at least include a citation (the link symbol at the end of each line of text). But, given AI’s enormous consumption of resources, how is this beneficial?

In a separate essay, I talked about Apple Intelligence, the company’s current effort to give consumers a reason to buy their latest phones that does not rely solely on tactical obsolescence. Apple promotes its onboard AI essentially as a way for people to cheat, to pretend to have done or learned things when all they really do is regurgitate whatever the AI churns out. This may seem useful to some people, but it certainly cannot have positive broader implications.

Whether it is AI or some other ‘smart’ innovation, the characterization seems inapt.

• How is a ‘smart’ appliance, small children’s toy, or other object really bettering our lives?

• Are we really so consumed with such important matters that we cannot remember to throw away our old pastrami or replenish our supply of milk?

• Does a WiFi-connected teddy bear meaningfully improve our toddler’s way of life?

• Do I need my car to remind me to drive carefully when the temperature is below freezing?

If you are smacking your lips at my ostensible bellyaching, let me offer a thought exercise.

Try to mentally catalog the internet-connected or otherwise ‘smart’ devices you use daily. How many of them have truly changed your life (for the better, anyway)?

In my house, aside from the obvious (computers, phones, and Firesticks), we have none. I am not gloating or parading myself as in any way superior—my choice not to engage began as a function of being cheap, and only persisted as these things became commonplace at my work and other places. But I mention it because I cannot think of any deficiency I have suffered as a result of my self-imposed depravation.

If someone texts me, I check my phone. No synced watch needed. To ensure my refrigerator is adequately stocked, I look in it—something I did my whole life, an activity that has never seemed overly onerous. After all, regardless of what the tech might tell me, I still have to clean it.

My thermostat is electronic (but not connected to the net); it came with the house. Even it is more annoying than useful. Recently I spent thirty minutes trying to figure out how to reset it when its timer went on the fritz, a timer I don’t even use. I am planning to replace it with an analog one as soon as I can find one—if I can find one.

A key aspect that we lose in these ‘revolutionary’ times is self-sufficiency. There is an associated movement that has arisen called the “right to repair.” It began about twenty years ago when manufacturers realized they could bleed more money from consumers by preventing them from fixing problems on their own. Encyclopedia Britannica sums up the idea:

Traditionally, owners of equipment could resolve issues either by learning the skills necessary to make repairs themselves or by taking the equipment to independently owned repair shops. However, especially in the past few decades, manufacturers have implemented artificial barriers to prevent product owners from repairing their own equipment.

As more items become attached to the internet, companies gain greater control over preventing you from making adjustments or fixes yourself (i.e. without paying the manufacturer).

Try to use an older version of Windows than Win11 or prevent unwanted updates to the operating system. It is a losing battle over time. For the motorheads out there, try to repair a newer car displaying a warning light on the dash without specialized tools. How many of you have had to replace an appliance or other household item because of software failures? Should a coffee brewer not be able to push water through grounds because a computer chip goes kerflooey?

We are sold these things as convenience, but it is contrived more than real.

A modicum of benefit, but at what cost?

Back in September of 2023, I had a row with my insurance company over the cost of coverage for my vehicles. The company raised the premium by 40% and the excuses it gave for doing so were laughable. When I attempted to negotiate, the response was to download their ‘safe-driving’ app to get a ‘discount.’ I did a deep dive into it. To use the scientific term, the app was shit. Read the details here, if you have the stomach for it.

In short, the app did not work properly, rendering the savings it purported to offer almost moot. Even if one did procure some cost reduction—a misleading ‘victory’ given that the app’s premise was thought up in response to skyrocketing premiums—the amount of data collected by the app was shocking. And the company was not exactly forthcoming about it. Nor was it forthcoming about what it intended to do with all that data. Read the piece to get an idea of the hurdles that I—a specialist in open-source intelligence—had to leap to find all this out.

I was always one to dive into the rabbit holes of many popular applications and other services. My discoveries are rarely uplifting. The vast majority of applications have lousy security and abscond with extraordinary amounts of data, usually in exchange for services we don’t need.

It astounds me, for example, that people happily buy internet-connected thermostats. The environment in our households is not so dynamic that we need the ability to log onto our phones to adjust it. Yet, by tethering it to the internet, we allow the company—and whomever it chooses to sell to—a backdoor into something that happens in our most private space: our homes.

It tells them about our specific preferences that alone, perhaps, do not seem so revealing, but combined with all the other data out there helps expose the entirety of our beings. Don’t get me started on home “voice assistants” or internet-connected cameras.

And for what gain?

Companies have already shown a willingness to use their remote access to control the way people use their services. When a massive heat wave struck Texas in 2021, stories circulated that companies were forcibly changing people’s thermostats to preserve energy.

It turned out that people had to opt in to the program, on the premise that they would save money; it purportedly was not being imposed upon the unwilling. Some participants claimed, however, that they did not know that they were consenting to remote changes to their household temperature.

Whether the customers were purposely misled or mere fools is both beside the point and directly the issue.

As my safe-driving app essay shows, customers are always at a disadvantage when it comes to understanding the nature of the contracted exchange. A core principle in contracts law requires a “meeting of the minds.” But people enter into so-called agreements with many companies through Terms of Service (ToS). Based on the way ToS are designed, there is no reasonable way to assert any meeting of the minds between contracting parties. One blogger described ToS perfectly:

[ToS] are long, boring and often baffling. Reading them is a tedious, joyless pursuit, and for the majority of us who aren’t legally trained, trying to understand them amounts to little more than our best guess. What’s more, there’s just so many of them. And they’re frequently changing, which means keeping up to date is far from easy. Faced with all this potential hassle, it’s no surprise we opt for convenience by choosing instead to simply click our acceptance. After all, we’re busy people with things to do, and ultimately, we just want stuff now – the site, the app or the online service.

The abuses of tech companies are far more extensive, of course. I discussed them in greater detail here:

Is it just a scam?

One cannot be blamed for questioning the fairness or legitimacy of any product or service that requires entering into decidedly one-sided ‘contracts’ like the ToS. And, if the counterclaim is that all contracts contain dense language, I would respond with:

True, but how often in the past did you enter contracts whose terms can change on a whim, decided and imposed by only one of the contracting parties?

In today’s world, you often unwittingly ‘buy’ things that you do not own. Some companies take away your digital content when they sell out to someone else. E-book readers sometimes see books disappear from their libraries when publishers arbitrarily pull them. Gamers have lost games (and their progress) due to software bugs. Even our possession of physical products is turning from ownership to licensed.

Centuries ago, David Hume articulated what modern folks have come to accept as a truism. Ownership is not a natural phenomenon. Rather, it is a relationship that sits on the foundations of justice and fairness. The deprivation of ownership by a cadre of the few is, in effect, an assault on these core principles of a civilized society.

Shifting to a societal paradigm where the masses procure mere tenuous licenses to virtually all things while ownership remains in the hands of the elite, is a move into oligarchy. It is granting control to those who contribute little but drain a lot, a modern day serfdom.

So, perhaps it is a mistake to call this all a scam. The more apt description might be that it is a covert wresting of supreme power and control.

A man’s property is some object related to him. This relation is not natural, but moral, and founded on justice. Tis very preposterous, therefore, to imagine, that we can have any idea of property, without fully comprehending the nature of justice, and shewing its origin in the artifice and contrivance of man. The origin of justice explains that of property. The same artifice gives rise to both.

David Hume; A Treatise of Human Nature [1739]

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I am the executive director of the EALS Global Foundation. You can find me at the Evidence Files Medium page for essays on law, politics, and history; follow the Evidence Files Facebook for regular updates, or Buy me A Coffee if you wish to support my work.