For most of the last century, we’ve been told that technology is a destiny. It would solve hunger, abolish drudgery, connect the world, democratize knowledge, and usher in a golden age of human flourishing. The marketing was relentless: each new gadget was a step toward utopia, each upgrade a leap for mankind.
The results are less inspiring. The promise of open access has been traded for gated ecosystems. The ideal of empowerment has been replaced with dependency. What was once billed as a universal good has become a self‑reinforcing system of control; one that extracts value from human life while dictating the terms of participation.
This isn’t just economic inequality amplified by digital means. It’s a form of systemic technological apartheid, Epartheid, where access to the means of creation, communication, and livelihood is mediated by corporate architectures designed to concentrate power. Those who control the system’s architecture control who may participate, and on what terms. Those outside are left in a digital shadow world: observed, quantified, and monetized, but never empowered.
The problem isn’t technology itself. The problem is who controls it, and how. In the current paradigm, technology is not a tool in the hands of individuals; it’s a global machine that shapes individuals to serve its own continuance. This is the inversion that must be broken.
Technology should be treated as a utility like water, electricity, or roads. A utility is judged by its reliability, affordability, and universality, not by the grandeur of its promise or the size of its quarterly earnings. Utilities don’t demand that you surrender your privacy, your autonomy, or your community in exchange for basic service. They are there to enable human activity, not to replace it.
The shift requires moving agency back to the individual. This means:
- Ownership: Users should be able to own and repair the tools they rely on.
- Interoperability: Systems must connect without forcing users into proprietary traps.
- Transparency: Code and data flows should be open to inspection.
- Local control: Communities should be able to run, maintain, and govern the tech they depend on without outside permission.
In short, we must end the expectation that technology will “run itself” for our benefit. That’s how it runs us instead. Systems that claim to be neutral become self‑justifying empires, optimizing not for human value but for system growth. Left unchecked, this produces a digital caste system in which the architects live above the rules, and everyone else is assigned their place in the algorithm.
The call to action is simple: Stop building for the system. Start building for the people. Resist the seduction of the self‑reinforcing machine. Treat technology as infrastructure that serves the unpredictable, stubborn, and deeply human purposes of those who use it. A utility doesn’t dream for you. It keeps the lights on so you can dream for yourself.
