It seems important to ask: why is this happening and how did we get here? We might start with a kind of combination koan and insight from world-renowned conservationist and humanitarian Dr. Jane Goodall who said: “Here we are the most clever species ever to have lived, so how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?” How indeed? Hyper-capitalist acceleration and the collapse of many long taken-for-granted social and political structures seem inextricably linked as if going in one direction and we inadvertently slide into another. As humanity reaches the pinnacle of technological mastery, we simultaneously seem to be descending into a kind of archaic chaos. 

Economic Globalism and AI

We’re being told by the scions of global wealth and power that AI is the answer to all of humanity’s problems. But perhaps this in and of itself is just one more problem. Not only are we the most clever species but we appear to be “clevering” ourselves into even more havoc by depending on a technological advance that hasn’t proven itself. It’s a half-baked end product even in the corporate marketplace let alone as a solution to an ever-growing swath of global social and political problems, often categorized under the moniker of polycrisis. And how curious it is that we’re seeing AI applied more to war than to addressing critical issues such as climate change. 

In this journey into uncharted waters, we may be witnessing a head-on collision with the limits of an overly rational view of the world. AI systems are supposed to represent the epitome of intelligence, but is it an act of intelligence to create something that even its Big Tech creators admit might precipitate humanity’s demise? The struggle between a Western world dominated by rationality and a detached view of the natural world has been percolating in the collective for a long time. In the 18^th century, poet and visionary William Blake railed against “the dehumanizing idolatry of reason.” In one way of looking at things, AI is the apotheosis of reason, further leaving human emotion, compassion, and appreciation or the need to connect to the natural world in the dust as it races towards the Next Big Thing. It appears to be a kind of Trojan Horse to promote hyper-capitalism and limitless economic expansion to the exclusion of all else.

The Fragility of the Global Village 

To understand the need for a return to a local-friendly future, it’s important to unpack how economic globalism is starting to unravel. The mis-application of advanced technologies has a huge hand in this. Visionary Marshall McLuhan’s illuminating notion of a “Global Village” has eroded as the Internet and digital technologies – once promising tools for education and enlightened collaboration – have now been corporate-captured. The formerly useful meme of being a “planetary citizen” somehow seems no longer viable. And the much-vaunted globalized system of communication and awareness that modernism depends on, and at one point seemed so promising for new human possibilities, has now shown itself to be a fragile construct that can be wiped out by bits of computer code gone awry. The inherent fragility of the digital foundations for globalism has now been exposed and revealed with two massive worldwide digital outages wreaking havoc in airports, hospitals, schools, and other core institutions which modern life relies on to function. 

The reality on the ground is that economic globalism is totally dependent on a privately owned and operated digital infrastructure for its very existence. Localism on the other hand is dependent on ordinary people doing ordinary things and connecting at human scale in a right-minded way. The contrast is stark but instructive. The first is dependent on the good graces of a few powerful oligarchs and a vast corporate infrastructure with tentacles reaching into every country. The latter is available via simple human empowerment and decision-making. The choice seems clear enough. 

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Tom Valovic is a writer, researcher, and media analyst. He is the author of Digital Mythologies (Rutgers University Press), a series of essays that explored emerging social and cultural issues raised by the advent of the Internet. Tom has served as a consultant to the former Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and was editor-in- chief of Telecommunications magazine for many years. He has written about the effects of technology on society, the media, and on environmental issues for a variety of publications including Common Dreams, Columbia University’s Media Studies Journal, Counterpunch, The Technoskeptic, Annals of Earth, the Sierra Club Newsletter, Wisdom magazine, the Whole Earth Review, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Examiner and many others. He can be reached at cloudhands5885@gmail.com.