Adam Wier

SPOILERS FOR THE HYPERION SERIES

I recently finished the Hyperion Cantos. For those who have never heard of it, you can check out this YouTube video, which will give a quick introduction to the first book and the various actors in the book's world. The video has no spoilers, unlike this blog post, and I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in Science Fiction. There's clear influences from Dune, and while the protagonist in the last book grinds my gears a little (like this time and this time), it is an amazing universe with a lot of memorable characters and some interesting thoughts about religion, transhumanism, and even love. But as I sit and process all I've come to read over the course of the four books, there's one aspect in particular that I can't help but to draw a metaphoric parallel to our relationship to technology today: the TechnoCore and their farcasters.

The world of Hyperion is set around 800 years from now. Earth is gone, humanity has spread out between many planets known as the Web, and AI has become sentient, forming a kind of separate nation known as the TechnoCore. Being a sentient AI nation, they are nearly all powerful, and if they wanted, they could, we assume, wipe out humanity within the blink of an eye. Fortunately, they don't seem to want to and keep humans as pets more or less, lending us their counsel and giving us little technological gifts from time to time. Among these gifts are the farcasters.

In the world of Hyperion, there are many worlds in the "web" and transportation between them is made possible by farcasters. By stepping through a farcaster,  the user seamlessly passes between one place to another. I hesitate to call this teleportation because that implies a pause or a break from one place to another but with farcasters, the movement across many lightyears is seamless. There are even homes made of multiple rooms stitched together through farcasters, each room on a different planet. The inhabitants just simply walk from room to room, like any other house.

However, at the end of the second book, a cataclysmic event occurs, ending the web and sending humanity into a new dark age. The leader of the Hegemony of Man, Meina Gladstone, (actually called the CEO of the Senate, heaven help us) shuts down the entire network. Overnight, people are stranded on their worlds, some even in rooms of their homes with no means of escaping, in the case of those with farcaster homes. Many starve or are deprived of needed medical attention as worlds that were never meant to be fully self-sufficient breakdown, now that they no longer have access to interstellar commerce. Communication between the worlds is also disrupted as the fatline, which allowed faster than light communication, also worked using similar technology. She is remembered in history as a brave woman able to make a difficult choice but with the blood of millions on her hands. A controversial figure in human history.

Why would she do such a thing? Why would she kill millions, destroy civilization and send it back into a new dark age?

For a long time, the Hegemony of Man had wondered where the TechnoCore's computing power come from. How did they carry out their millions of calculations, allowing them to predict the course of human history, and even attempt to create an "Ultimate Intelligence," their approximation of an AI god. Well... it was us, the humans. In the brief and infinitesimal moment as people moved through the farcasters, the TechnoCore borrowed their neural synapses for their own ends. A split second may not seem like much but if you take into account how many people were moving through the farcaster network at any given second, the computing power was enormous. The only way to stop them was to shut the network down, return their gifts back to them, and lock them out of our world, abandoned in that space between spaces people entered when they farcasted, the Void Which Binds.

I could not help but to see in the TechnoCore an allegory for our relationship with Big Tech ^[1]. Our dependence on their "gifts", their parasitic nature on our attention spans and personal information, the way they use us (arguably just as nonconsensually as the TechnoCore) to gather more money and power. As the saying goes, "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Most apps, websites, social networks and so forth coming from Big Tech are free because though we don't pay, they gain something even more valuable than money: information. (Which of course they sell for money. Let's be real. This is late stage capitalism after all.) Ad revenue and the harvesting of demographic data is how much of the so-called "free" internet makes money. And since the November 2024 elections, even companies such as Meta and Google, which had long feigned a veneer of neutrality and ethics, have begun capitulating to fascism. Not to mention whatever Twitter has become.

Their services are our farcasters. Using these websites, we give them access to our bodies and minds. Their algorithms are designed to make us angry and fight one another, creating that sweet, sweet engagement but also echo chambers and misanthropy. Everyone is attempting to have their own mic drop moment instead of listening and understanding one another. It's blood sports and colosseums, while the king laughs on in amusement, happy at how much noise we are making in his own little digital enclosure, hoping others will come join in on the hate parade. In this attention economy, they are no different than the TechnoCore using our minds, our clicks, our comments, our reactions to feed their demographic data. All that thinking, time, and energy so they can see if you're worth selling a Stanley Cup to. And the best we can hope that they'll use that data for is advertising and not more nefarious ends.

If the sheer power that coming from all this money we give them is not the problem, then consider that we are also gifting them the power of surveilling us more easily. Though we can safely admit that the cat is out of the bag now on having total privacy on the internet, we can at the very least not make things easier for them. This surveillance is not just a question of mere observing either. One might be quick to think, "I have nothing to hide. It is alright by me if they see what I am doing," but what you might not have considered is how this surveillance allows for direct control of your actions^[2]. While we tend to think of the algorithm curating content that you want to see, we'd be wrong on two accounts:

1. It's curating content that will keep you on the app, not what you want to see necessarily, and that distinction is important. (Do you want to see some right winger's lack of understanding of biology on your feed? So why is it there?)

2. In controlling what you see, it also controls what you do by controlling what you see as available actions. And I don't mean just whether you get to like this post or that, but for real-life, offline actions as well. The alt-right pipeline is a good example of this. What we see online morphs our actions and thoughts, and we allow that to be done by us by those in power based off the data we give them. Multiple school shooters have taken the very real life action of murdering multiple people because of this influence over their possible actions.

But if we think beyond any political implications and think about what this means for our emotional and spiritual well-being, we can see in ourselves the same stagnation in our current society that the Hegemony had due to its dependence on the TechnoCore. Our curiosity is dwindling and withering away. Why go looking for new music when Spotify can regurgitate some music you listened to last week that it told you you liked? Perhaps you went to YouTube to search for something, but in the end, wasn't it much easier to just click on one the proposed videos on your feed and allow the autoplay to continue to regurgitate the 100th video on the same topic back to you? The scope of our minds is shrinking, and the experiences and ideas that we come into contact with more and more narrow. Is it no wonder that with this lack of exposure to other ideas, we are becoming more tribalistic?

As things stand now, in this age of rising technofeudalism, the tech companies have the power. But where does this power come from? The internet, once a wild west, used to be like a sprawling prairie, where anyone could set up their small homestead^[3], on what seemed like limitless virtual land. The possibilities seemed endless, and there seemed to be a place for everyone. Now the internet is filled with enclosures. Everything belongs to Google or Amazon Web Services or Microsoft. Most of what we use passes through major platforms run by Meta or Twitter. The internet was carved up and pieces were sold off. We no longer have homesteads; we rent.

But it was us who helped build these enclosures. They, much like kings claiming divine right before us, were not born with this power. It was vested in them by us. We gave it up to them. We've rescinded our power in favor of the ease and dubious benefits of their algorithms and AI. Like the Hegemony, we have become complacent and stagnated, dependent on them. We must take back our power. But even more than that, we must take back our minds and bodies for ourselves.

The Fediverse, indieweb, smallweb and FLOSS movements are good starts. There exist alternatives out there to the social networks, email services, drive synchronization services, whatever you need them for. Good, well-functioning alternatives. A common complaint is that they have not reached main-stream success, but that is a chicken-or-the-egg problem. The more people go, the more they will become mainstream. We cannot wait for them to be mainstream or it will never happen. No one is coming to save us. There is no Melina Gladstone to shut down the farcasters, someone ready to make difficult decisions in our place. We must all make the decision ourselves and shut them out, cut them off from our synapses, leave them in the Void Which Binds. In this extremely troubling time, this is the least you could do. Stop handing them power and information on a silver platter.

I could continue on about other benefits that I've found by changing to more humane and ethical ways of using technology: better mental health, learning new skills, hanging out in a part of the internet where people are generally pretty nice and revel in their own uniqueness, touching grass a bit more often. It may seem scary to leave behind these tools we've become accustomed to, but we are in scary times. Now is the time, more than ever, to be brave and find a new way of being.