The Tyranny of the Quantifiable: How Technology Steals Our Humanity
In an era where Silicon Valley's oligarchs preach convenience, efficiency, and productivity as supreme virtues, we find ourselves increasingly disconnected from what makes us human. The relentless push toward outsourcing decisions to algorithms, replacing human interaction with chatbots, and treating the natural world as an afterthought creates a life void of genuine connection. This digital annexation of our existence demands collective resistance and a conscious effort to reclaim what technology systematically strips away.
The Lost Art of Embodied Experience
Summer after summer, I would descend into a shaded creek bed, spending hours picking blackberries until my hands were stained purple and covered in scratches from thorny canes. This wasn't merely about harvesting fruit; it was about immersion in a sensory world. Listening to birds and flowing water, noticing jewel-like insects among the berries, feeling cool water on my feet while wading – these experiences created a profound tranquillity that soaked into my being. The jam I made from those berries carried not just fruit, but something of that creek's peace and summer's essence.
This embodies what environmental activist Chip Ward called "the tyranny of the quantifiable" – the dangerous tendency to value only what can be measured while dismissing the immeasurable richness of process and experience. Whether it's gardening, dancing, dog-walking, or cake-decorating, everyone has their version of deep immersion in the moment. What matters is that we're besieged by an ideology that maximises having while minimising doing, stealing from us relationships, connections, and eventually our very selves.
The Erosion of Public Life and Human Contact
Silicon Valley's narrative has convinced many that going out into the world, interacting with others, represents peril, unpleasantness, and inefficiency. This has led to a systematic reordering of society where public spaces and public life have withered. Simple errands that once meant moments of human contact – buying milk or socks, observing weather and nature – created familiarity with our surroundings and casual relationships beyond our immediate circles.
These daily acts underpin democracy: ease with difference, familiarity with our environment, a sense of connection and belonging. Chronic withdrawal from public life, constantly framed as beneficial, has weakened local institutions and isolated us in countless small ways. It can transform a sense of something missing into aversion, numbness, or unrealistic expectations about human contact. The resilience to survive difficulty and discord, to brave unmediated human interaction, must be maintained through practice – something Silicon Valley-bred isolation systematically erodes.
Consider the casual Indian restaurant where ordering now requires punching selections into a touchscreen rather than speaking to a fellow human. Servers seem miserable with more mechanised, less social tasks. In San Francisco neighborhoods annexed by Silicon Valley, these screens proliferate in eating establishments, with people possibly choosing them over human interaction due to technology-inculcated aversion to contact.
Outsourcing Thought and Emotion
Having convinced us to avoid unmediated human contact, Silicon Valley now suggests we shouldn't do our own thinking, creating, or communicating. Advertisements proclaim "You'll never think alone again," fundamentally misunderstanding what thinking represents and why we might want to do it ourselves. The price of giving up these activities is the atrophy of our ability to perform them.
Sociologist Sherry Turkle notes that our capacity for solitude – essential for developing empathy – becomes undermined as soon as we introduce screens. Stories emerge of people consulting AI for marriage and parenting advice, even taking photos of fruits to ask algorithms if they're ripe. Ripeness, something traditionally judged by smell and feel, becomes another outsourced decision, potentially leading to forgetting how to make basic judgments about the world.
The epidemic of students using ChatGPT for homework represents perhaps the most extreme example of dispensing with process while claiming the product. In education, the ultimate product isn't the term paper or grade point average; it's the self that emerges more informed, capable of critical thinking, and competent in their field. Students who cheat their professors ultimately cheat themselves, missing how writing – which is mostly thinking – develops worldview, ethics, and linguistic capacity.
The Hollow Promise of AI Companionship
AI relationships present particularly troubling developments. From chatbots writing anniversary poems to AI erotic companions, we're offered pale shadows of embodied human connection. Sex with an actual person involves all senses, biological reality, and the ancient, species-spanning dance of two animals coming together. It involves demands, risks, and the possibility that needs won't align – the price of admission for genuine intimacy.
AI companions promise constant availability with no needs of their own, reflecting a capitalist argument that we should get as much as possible while giving as little. Yet we gain something from giving – at minimum, a sense of being someone with something to offer, a measure of our own wealth, generosity, and power. Love discussed as a commodity to stockpile, harvest, or extract misses that being loved without loving represents a miser's hoarding of someone else's wealth.
Reclaiming Embodied Life and Community
Cognitive psychologist James Coan's experiments with married women and hand-holding revealed that a person given mild electrical shocks had much calmer reactions when their husband held their hand. This reminds us of who we are fundamentally: social animals who need physical presence and connection. While fight-or-flight responses to danger are well-known, the tend-and-befriend response – turning to each other for safety in emergencies – receives less recognition but is equally vital.
Neuroscientist Molly Crockett contrasts receiving spiritual advice from "Dalai Lama chatbots" with actually meeting the Dalai Lama. Face-to-face interaction allowed teachings to "reverberate through my whole body" and shift knowledge "in my very bones" in ways disembodied information sources cannot replicate. This embodiment matters profoundly.
The solution to technology's isolating effects isn't more technology. The solution to loneliness is each other – a wealth that should be available to most of us most of the time. We need to rebuild or reinvent ways and places where we meet, recognizing them as spaces of democracy, joy, connection, love, and trust. Real friends can bake cakes, drive us home, hold our hands, and live through crises and celebrations with us in ways AI never can.
Resisting Dehumanisation
Resisting Silicon Valley's annexation of our hearts and minds requires not just setting boundaries on technological engagement, but actively cherishing alternatives. Joy in ordinary things, in each other, in embodied life, and the language to value these experiences represents essential resistance to dehumanisation. The natural world reminds us of a universe far beyond human-made technologies, offering patterns, rhythms, and scales from microscopic to galactic that put our egos in proper perspective.
We're told machines will become like us, but in many ways they demand we become more like them. To prevent this requires valuing what cannot be measured – described, evoked, cherished, but never boiled down to simple metrics like efficiency and profitability. The struggle may be difficult precisely because what we're defending resists quantification, but its immeasurable value makes the effort essential for preserving our humanity in an increasingly digital age.
