What has technology done to us?

It's bizarre for me to think about being 13 years old and how sandboxed technology was back then.

In the early 90s, the internet was so small and quaint. It was Usenet groups, FTP sites, and local BBSs. And our access was limited by slow dial-up modems and having to fight for time on the family computer.

Back then, being into computers was still kind of its own identity. You were a nerd, a geek. I embraced it.

As a shy kid who lived on an acreage in the country, I felt like I had more in common with the geeks I met on FidoNet, bulletin boards, and early websites.

There weren't many people online back then. It felt like nerds were building our own little utopia. It wasn't perfect (there were flame wars and lots of trolling), but directionally (at least to me) it felt like a better version of the real world. It was a place where you could make things, explore your curiosity, and encounter new perspectives.

So it's natural that we wanted more of it. Every time computers and the internet progressed, it felt like the world was getting better. Faster broadband! Portable hardware! Cellular data! It all made technology more available, cheaper, and more powerful. And all of that felt good.

And technology has been good to me. In every career I've been in, being "a computer geek" has been a benefit. It's helped me get promoted and start businesses. It helped me provide for my family. It's given me a good life.

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But what has this technology done to us?

Now, in 2026, we geeks got everything we wanted (and more).

What was once niche technology, reserved for a select few who read computer manuals, is now ubiquitous. We all have pocket supercomputers that are always connected to fast internet.

But I don't think we realized the cumulative effects all this technology would have on society.

There's just more of everything. So many elements of that small, quaint early internet are here, but they've been amplified, magnified, multiplied.

All this technology, in everyone's hands, has just produced so much stuff. It's had so many effects, in every direction.

Someone on Bluesky posted this:

"I think we truly don’t appreciate how much the internet has influenced and given rise to the idea that everything is debatable and the ultimate arbiter of truth is determined by who is willing to talk the longest."

That's just one effect.

Media has finally been democratized! (Which is exactly what the 13-year-old version of myself wanted). But now that everyone has a megaphone they can use at every moment of the day to post whatever they want... there are repercussions.

This technology is doing stuff to us (individually and collectively).

Technology will always do its worst thing

I overheard my internet friend Dave Jones on a podcast. He said: "Technology will always do its worst thing."

I asked him to unpack it. He responded:

That is Jacque Ellul in The Technological Society. That is my paraphrase of his ideas that technology is "morally autonomous" and that it always seeks it's "most efficient use". That's why it wants to exist. Nobody designs a sub-optimal technology on purpose.

Maybe a better way I should say it is that... technological innovation is sociopathic. Sociopaths can do some good in the world, but they will also do their worst. They're driven to.

I'm not sure I agree with the framing that "technological innovation is sociopathic," but Dave's original framing ("technology will always do its worst thing") resonates deeply.

There will be negative second-order effects of almost every widely distributed technology.

Even if the initial intention was pure, once you put technology in the hands of the masses, the mega-corporations, the government, and criminals... there's going to be some bad.

And it's a mess.

Technology has given us so much, but it's also made a mess.

Technology has given me so much, but now I can see the good and the bad.

It's all there.

And what do we do now? We can't go back. We can't erase the past or change where it's brought us.

I still like computers. I still like making things with computers. But I'm definitely more cognizant that everything we put out into the world has a cost.

Regards,
Justin Jackson

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