Tech will save us! Tech will end us!

Here's what you can do now to feel better about All the Things Internet-related. Plus Deaf Awareness Week, Lorde, Of the Oak and Theatre Things. And hope you have a screen-less Bank Holiday

One in 3 people in the UK are affected by hearing loss. That’s a lot – about 18 million people. Deaf Awareness Week is coming up (5-11 May). You might remember I recently ‘came out’ as being Hard of Hearing in this piece in Exeunt. After that piece came out I had some lovely responses from the theatre world and the D/deaf and Hard of Hearing world. One of which was StageText, which is a deaf-led charity that will celebrate its 25-year anniversary next week. StageText provides a gold-standard captioning and subtitle service to theatres and live performance venues like the National Theatre. They are campaigning to make accessibility the norm. If you run a company and want it to be more accessible, they have loads of resources, including a free webinar about it here. Now for the tech bit.

Earlier this year I wasn’t being as regular as usual. I don’t usually experience writing blocks (constipation of the mind, if you will) but I was ill and also angry at the many ways the great rich powerful people in the world seem to be hellbent on bringing about the planet’s demise as fast as possible.

I’ve also just listened to Careless People, by Sarah Wynn-Williams, about her seven years inside Facebook / Meta, as director of global policy, working with Mark Zuckerberg, fresh from a job at the UN where she tried to conserve fish and save the world, to a tech empire where Zuckerberg changed from a monosyllabic boy-man among politicians, to creating a strategy to be President of the World.

That sick, falling-down-the-wrong-trouser-leg-of-history feeling I’ve been having since 2016, when I was in the U.S. witnessing how people had views about voting that didn’t always make sense (Hilary wants to steal our guns! It’s Bernie or bust!) that feeling now has an explanation. The Trump campaign’s biggest spend was on Facebook ads. Its largest revenue was also from Facebook ads. These ads were so specifically targeted, they would tell you exactly what you needed to hear to either go out and vote for Trump or stay home and not vote for Hillary.

What can we do?

In that face of global power that huge, not much, but a little. Governments can still take action. We can pressure governments. And we are…

I’ve said it before, but Silicon Valley does not use social media. They know how bad it is. It’s addictive and embedded in our lives. Now we have AI seeping in the same way.

Take Google, which handles more than 90% of Internet searches worldwide. It is now providing us with an ‘AI Overview’ when we search (Or at least quite a few of us. If you don’t have that yet, it's coming). That AI box at the top which usually tells you what you already know and definitely do not need. Guess what? That little useless AI Overview is accelerating our demise. Text-based generative AI answers use the energy equivalent of 30 normal Google searches.

About amonth ago, I got a bit nihilistic and I couldn’t do a Google search or look at Instagram without thinking along the lines of: That image of you as a Studio Ghibli character probably cost a bathtub full of water, a tree, one phone battery charge, a 20-mile round-trip in a diesel car and the eradication of a rare species that hasn’t even been discovered yet. It was gloomy. Then it was guilt-ridden because I’m part of the problem. The problem is me… and you. But look, we can sort this out.

Fight the Apathy

I left socials and started to look at solutions to this that are very easy to do and cost nothing and are also realistic to implement for someone who uses the internet every day.

Clearly, we are not going to simultaneously throw our phones in the sea and go back to the world that existed in the late-Nineties (even though those were great times) and I think a lot of us feel apathetic and impotent in the face of the magnitude of it all.

But from a tech/internet use perspective, there are things you can do right now to help. We still have power, both individual and collective, to turn the ship around.

Ofcom, the media regulator, has recently announced 40 proposals to strengthen child safety online. After charities got together and said they were too weak and people are demanding that the government take action, Labour has said it will intervene to force social media and online search tools to be safer and more responsible. This is a move, albeit a slow and unweildy one, in the right direction. Social Media and search engines have the data already to do this, they just don’t want to because it will cost money.