In 2011, I authored a manuscript titled Fixing Broken Robots. The title came from the intersection of engineered obsolescence and automation. Over time, the quality of nearly everything will continue declining while more and more tasks are handed over to robots. The robots themselves will be of low quality, with some breaking down constantly. So I titled the work Fixing Broken Robots because that's what the future probably looked like.
In 2012, the manuscript was cited in the Journal of Future Studies, in a paper by Oliver Markley titled Imaginal Visioning for Prophetic Foresight. In 2016, I released a revised and illustrated version of this book. You can apparently still buy a paper copy on Magcloud.
Here's how the work begins:
Some things that are easy to describe are also challenging to convey. Some truths, when communicated from one person to another, begin to decompose. Some objects of consideration become invisible as moments are transformed into memories. Some subjects may only be approached indirectly.
This little book is divided up into two volumes. First is System, about our total system and how technology is transforming it. Next is Trancewar Primer, about the psychological mechanics of mind control in the context of an increasingly networked world. Most of the material continues to hold water, but I wrote it when there was still hope for society, in a moment before our control regime's COVID response plunged us fully into dystopia.
Looking back, I can see the shortcomings of this work clearly. Some of the studies it relied on didn't hold up over time. For example, technological unemployment in the US isn't having quite the impact I anticipated. While some jobs are definitely disappearing due to automation, many of these are low wage overseas jobs that people in the US barely notice.
Other shortcomings of this work include dense philosophical writing that many readers find impenetrable, too much unfamiliar jargon, at least one serious diagram error, and a perspective on psychology that the vast majority of people simply cannot process. By this, I don't mean that they're incapable of grasping the concepts. Rather, there are mechanisms that have been installed in their psychology which cause them to unconsciously avoid awareness of the information. It's not so much a comprehension issue as a programming issue.
I tried to get around this by using terms like trancewar to describe the perpetual contest over what and how we think. The problem I ran into was that most people resist the whole idea that their thoughts and behaviors are largely the result of external influences, including other people and information in their environment. The irony here is that becoming aware of these influences and how they operate is usually necessary to free yourself from them. Deprogramming is much more difficult if you're avoiding awareness of the programs that need to be modified or deleted.
Revisiting this publication after all of these years has me toying with putting out a revised edition in 2025. This would be fun, but I wonder how necessary it really is. I've already boiled most of the work's most important points down into a handful of easily digestible Substack posts. And I feel like society has already become precisely the dystopia that the book argued against.
Maybe I'll do a revised edition titled Fixing Broken Robots in Dystopia. Given how tech is transforming the control regime, I'd have to totally rewrite System. And there's been a ton of new psychology research in the last decade, so Trancewar Primer would also need a total rewrite. Instead of static information design and printed graphics, I could do the whole thing as a web page. This might be cool, but I'm not ready to commit yet.
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