Safety .Net
More and more time spent in worlds that do not necessarily tack to the laws of our nature... will do what exactly to us long term? Your guess is as good as mine.
Are we lost? Like as a species? I think we are. I think we’re kind of lost.
The laptop, the platform, the online landscape, the smart phone… these are things we cling to day in and day out. And… we have no idea how they work.
What are the natural laws of Instagram? Or Tik-tok. Or YouTube.
Ask me what the laws of nature are for a cocktail party, a baby shower, a board meeting and I can give you a list of rules. If you do this… that thing will likely happen. Enter a room with purpose, make eye contact with one or two people, smile and say something and nine times out of ten, you have a reasonable sense of how things will go. Stay in that room for 30 minutes and you know much much more… who is open to you, who might best be avoided, where the simmering rivalries lie and how your standing in the broader context is shifting up or down. In most cases when you’re in a room with other human beings and you’re failing to connect, you feel it right away. And that’s a good thing because that feeling is an opportunity. A chance to regroup, reconsider and maybe try a different approach.
Online, there is nothing but a cumulative tally of quantities… likes, shares, comments. We can stare into the numerical abyss searching for some human takeaways. But really, we’ll be searching forever because there are none.
And yet, we are told to invest. And to invest heavily. And consistently in these algorithmichemical worlds because somehow for each of us, they tell us our future is supposed to depend on them.
But I think there’s a whisper some of us may hear… every once in a while that says maybe just maybe this emperor has no clothes.
And it would be funny if it weren’t so goddamned terrifying. Because in 2026 it’s way too late for us to point and laugh at Big Tech.
Because make no mistake. At this very moment there are armies of human beings who have tied their fortunes and their egos and their raison d’etres to these opaque, hastily launched, pseudo-worlds with such fierce determination that they will not allow us to opt out. They insist on gifting us this awkward and harmful kaleidoscope while insisting it is actually a telescope. “Look again,” they might say, should we dare to turn away.
You’re just not looking hard enough or long enough or in the absolute right direction. Life is there. If you can’t see it, the problem is in your eyes. Because clearly, it’s there. I mean, it has to be. Right? I mean, we wouldn’t have invested everything unless we knew. Right? I mean, who would do that? So of course, we knew. We know. This is real.
And powerful government officials join in… insisting that these worlds are good for us. And real. Really real.
With each year it becomes a little more awkward to just opt out. To really say “no thank you. I’m good” to all of this blind faith.
People tell me I might be missing out.
Might be.
What if the guys (and they are mostly guys) selling us all their myths of technology as indispensable just aren’t willing to take No for an answer?
What if opting out of their over-funded and universally-hyped offerings annoys them.
Like deeply.
Opting out of algorithms, for instance, is now virtually impossible. If you bank or pay for health insurance or use a major credit card there are formulas deciding stuff for you. And nobody holding the keys to the controls has any intention of making any of it transparent. Ever.
So right now, already, the tech bro billionaires are punishing us… for all sorts of offenses… real and imagined and built upon a foundation of hidden values and biases most of which we will never even know were there… working against us… in the shadows.
It’s not safe for human beings in places where relationships—the foundation of what makes life worth living, what keeps us safe, what gets us up in the morning—are under threat.
They built a bunch of artificial worlds on an anti-human assumption, that every one of us can be described as a unique string of numbers. And we are not numbers. We are not numbers.
We are not numbers.
We are not.
In a world of nothing but numbers how on earth will we know we exist? How do I know I’m real?
When I am seen by you, that’s how.
I’m neither One nor Zero.
Just something vaguely in between.
Safety .Net was written for the May 2026 edition of Memoir Church: Writers Resistance where it was read by Suze Allen. Check out the video @41:55:
Roland, As always, you hit the nail smack on its head. As Cory Doctorow called it, Big Tech has willfully - for its purposes - enshitificated, the digital universe. It began with an approach to social life as counter-cultural, and has now ended up with billionaires and wanna be trillionaires (Musk, anybody?) creating a universe that serves their megalomaniacal wants and desires to the distress and "shitification" of any and all users. But Luddites at the beginning of Industrialization understood the factories that replaced their skills in much the same way.
Relatedly, do we in fact understand how the digital world is constructed any more than we (typically) understand how our bodies, our automobiles, our heating and cooling systems work? Heck! Do we even understand how a cup of coffee or a shot of whisky (or even whiskey) ends up in our hands? Do we even understand where money comes from? I mean REALLY understand?