Greetings friends. It’s been a busy old month. In February, the retail version of SUNWARD SKY went out (cheers, applause and general excitement ensues) and I’m really happy with the result. It’s now available at a bunch of bookstores. If you’re interested in an ebook you can get a copy here, or physical books are available at:
In Australia
Dymocks, Readings, Brunswick Bound, Pictures and Pages, Booktopia, with more locations to come.
In Not Australia
I’m also working on a bunch of new stuff at the moment. When I launched Sunward Sky, I knew I had another book I’d be able to get out this year. I’m not going to give too much away just yet, but it’s called UPLINK, a cyberpunk horror novel. Keep an eye out in Q4 this year.
Anyway, enough about my books. Lemme tell you about some thoughts I’ve been having about tech recently.
Why Tech Sucks Now
I’ve just finished reading a book by Thomas K Slee, a technothriller by the name of Project Gateway. It’s a romp through a world where a near-defunct phone manufacturer (which bears more than a passing similarity to Nokia, god rest their soul) has invented a new technology: Teleportation.
So now, instead of the texts we all send, the phone calls we all avoid, and the video calls we have foisted on us by post-covid work meetings, we can just… open up a portal to anywhere on Earth and walk through.
Conceptually, that rocks, but Slee’s book quickly points out the kind of power games that would immediately follow the invention of such a technology. One where petrol to fuel cars is unnecessary. Airlines are a thing of the past. Customs? fuhgeddaboudit. National borders would functionally cease to exist, much to the chagrin of a certain roman saluting subset of the population. Industries would falter and fall so quickly that we wouldn’t be able to shift focus fast enough to stem the economic bloodletting. Sitting here and thinking about it isn’t actually enough to understand how big the repercussions of such a technological leap would be. It would play out in rapid-fire and overwhelm anyone’s ability to understand the way the world was reshaping until long after the dust settled.
It’s a good book and you should get yourself a copy. It’s available here1, but between all the high-stakes subterfuge and action scenes, the premise of the story got me thinking.

Slee has, I think, correctly and succinctly identified what it is that technological revolutions bring that makes them unique, and what makes them so powerful.
So in this, Part 1, I’m gonna talk about today is what I think A Good Technology(tm) does. Then I’m gonna talk about what the Tech industry is doing that isn’t that thing that Good Technology(tm) does. In Part 2, I’m going to expand on this idea with some Lefty Marxist bullshit, then I’m gonna talk about why we’re too dumb to go back and compare us (humans) to pigeons.
Sound good? Yeah man, great guns let’s fuckin go.
Shortening the Distance
The teleportation devices in Slee’s novel make the distance between any humans arbitrarily small. If we all carry Gateway encoded phones in our pocket, we can meet whoever we like for lunch, a work meeting, a sudden holiday, whatever. The effective distance to anywhere in the world is reduced to the distance to the nearest telephone device.
When you think about it, every single major productive technology (not things like bombs. Broken window fallacy and all) has been a foreshortening of the distance, either physical or temporal, between humans and the tasks they want to accomplish.
Agriculture meant that the amount of time it took to find food was reduced. The automobile meant that travel time was reduced. The aeroplane did the same thing on a bigger scale. Industrial production reduced, well, production time. All of these things made humans, in effect, closer to the things that we want. For all of these things, the resultant uplift was one of productivity. We are able to be more productive, because a thing has become more readily available, from transport to farming to automation.
When it comes to communications technology, it’s a slightly different thing. I’d argue that every successful revolution of communications technology has brought conceptually closer to the audience. By audience, I don’t just mean audiences for creators. I mean the second person in a conversation. I mean the ability to have conversations with more people more quickly. I mean the way we have gotten better at reducing the rate at which information decays.
Consider writing, an invention that should trump fire for our greatest creation as a species if not that the fact that we needed a fire to read by at night. Prior to that, information decay occurred quickly because knowledge was essentially a giant game of pass the message (a children’s game which used to be known by a far more racist name when I was growing up). After its invention, written ideas were conceptually closer between speaker (writer) and audience (reader) because everyone was getting a first hand account. No more incidents of Barry getting a garbled mess of an instruction that leads him to a poisoned waterhole because someone said northwest instead of southwest. Instructions to the correct waterhole are on the wall, directly from the source. For everyone.
Paper did a similar thing. Now you can disseminate your waterhole finding instructions widely, reducing the travel time for all the people who need to get to the cave. The printing press expanded the idea, and now you could duplicate instead of handwrite every instruction (by this time I imagine we were telling each other about more interesting things than where to find the waterhole). Then we got the telephone and that ability to converse directly became super easy. The conceptual distance began to vanish.
This trend has continued into the digital age. Email meant you could annoy people at other workplaces more easily. The internet meant you could lie about vaccines to a bigger audience and Youtube meant you could do it on video. In every case, there was a new way of communicating that was more effective than what came before at simulating being in a room with another person.

Social media, for good or ill, has closed the conceptual gap to people’s lives. You can now follow any number of weirdos who are willing to walk you through the minutiae of their boring days. It perplexes me why you would, but that’s something that is only possible because of the combined invention of mobile phones, high bandwidth data, and fifteen squillion megapixel cameras. Otherwise, the amount of work involved is substantially higher.
For a long time, then, the innovations in commtech, and indeed the project of it, was to allow communication and transfer of information from person to person to improve. I hope that I’m getting that idea across, and I’ve effectively described how it occurs in any number of forms. However, I don’t think that the tech giants of today or the “innovations” that are being foisted on us are actually doing it, which is why I think they’re probably destined to fail, but also to just make the internet slowly worse.
(Un)Shortening the distance
I’m going to start with the Metaverse. Laughing stock it is now, not least because Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t gone through his surfer boy glow up at the time but still insisted on appearing in the promo video for reasons I’ll never be able to fathom, but there was a good few months there where tech journalists were breathless about the opportunities it presented.
Those “opportunities” are best summed up in The Future is a Dead Mall with the withering “A place where you can shop, buy things, purchase goods and go to stores”, nailing home the very correct inference that what the metaverse functioned as was a 3D shopping simulator. And we already have that, it’s called Fortnite. The amount of resources and capital required to make even a very building in the metaverse was so high that it presented a barrier to people being able to use it. Instead, what ended up happening in the various metaverses (not just Zuck’s) was the 3D landscape became a home base from which users would jump out, back into the 2D interfaces we usually use to navigate the internet.
Likewise, the dream of being able to walk around a 3D simulation of a shop instead of browsing a series of tiled images turned out to be a non-starter. If we take this back to the idea of conceptual distance, you can see why it didn’t work: online retail works so well because you don’t have to walk around. There’s a search bar and a bunch of buttons arrayed flat, and the different “departments” are only a few menu clicks away. To then take the idea of an online store and re-introduce the idea of physical space is increasing the distance between a user and their goal, not shortening it. The only reason it’s fun to traverse space in video games is because the simulated space is full of challenges, puzzles, art and design, all of which a grocery store categorically does not contain. I want to get my packet mie goreng and choccie milk and get out as fast as possible, thanks all the same.
This is all discussed in more detail by Dan in his Decentraland video (linked above), but my summary is to align it with this conceptual distance framework I’m discussing here. Tech giants built this but it didn’t work because it’s making the distance between users and goals larger.
And when you think of a lot of the big hyped things in tech in the last few years it’s the same.
And here’s where I talk about Crypto bullshit for a little while.
I’m going to ignore the boneheaded ideology that lies at the core of cryptocurrency and the level of destruction it wreaks on the environment and all that other stuff for now (but, y’know… note those things down). Instead, I’m going to concentrate on just what it takes for crypto to be adopted and used as currency.
First you need to explain how crypto works. That’s a learning cliff, because despite what crypto enthusiasts think, nobody who has had sex before really cares about how distributed blockchain ledgers work. Once you’ve managed to tie them to a chair and foist that information on them against their will, they need to get a wallet, wallet manager, they need to get their key and (if they’re thinking about hosting the chain themselves) more hard drives than any human should ever need.

Then, trying to find someone that accepts the payment in whatever shitcoin you’re able to actually afford at the moment (because bitcoin is deflating at the rate you would expect of a limited supply currency that’s undergoing corporate capture). Then the process of actually transferring it out it is fraught, and if you get it wrong? Tough! the ledger is immutable and you’ve just lost your cash.
And when I say “just” I mean “in anywhere between ten minutes and 72 hours”, or sometimes it just won’t work because the network is slow as shit.

Now, I’m not one to stan banks, but I sign up for a bank account and I can buy pretty much whatever I want, when I want, it takes less time to process than the page to load. If I make a mistake I can contact the bank and get it reversed. The process isn’t always seamless, but there are fewer seams than the Nike sweatshop that is Crypto.
Because they make clothes. Clothes have seams. You get it.
Again, Crypto is trying to disrupt a system that has made great strides in shortening the conceptual distance with its own (much longer) conceptual distance, and it hasn’t worked for anything other than anonymous drug peddling and porn sites. It’s harder to understand, more computationally expensive, slower, and more difficult to find payments for. Which is why even the most committed of HODLers will exchange their Crypto for cash before they use it for anything. It’s just a path of least resistance thing.
Same goes for NFTs, obviously. If I want to support an artist I’ll pay them and they can send me a JPG. I don’t care if it’s possible that someone else has a copy of my JPG that they didn’t pay for. The trade off for the “security” and “ownership” that an NFT gives me isn’t worth the faff of actually setting up an NFT account.
And finally, AI. AI is currently being lauded as a new form of communication and a paradigm shift set to disrupt all kinds of industries. Obviously I’ve written about this a couple of years ago, but we’re a few years into the hype now and I’m yet to see it genuinely move the dial on making things easier or better. It’s a set of jangled keys poised above the gormless golden retriever of the tech industry, and thus far it only seems to be working because manufacturers keep shoving it into their products. It’s easy to claim a massive uplift in AI capabilities when you automatically install it in everyone’s phones. Thanks to U2 for setting the precedent on that one, I guess.
If we’re to shift the discussion about AI into this framework of conceptual distance, it’s that now instead of just… sending an email or reading a bunch of abstracts, we take all those files (that we still, presumably, have to compile ourselves), feed them into the AI, whereupon it guesses what we want, approximates it fairly badly and at huge computational expense. It’s taking a detour down a straight road.
So there’s three (four if you count NFTs as a separate hype cycle to Crypto) technological innovations that have been popular in the last decade or so, and all of them have been complications more than innovations. Highly expensive and resource hungry processes that have been used in aid of replacing streamlined systems with less efficient versions.
I don’t think they’re going to work, but the companies that work them have the ability to make them proliferate just by pure market force. Do you use Microsoft Word? Well, get ready for an annoying AI shitheel to pop up and make suggestions for you all the time with the latest update! How do we turn it off? We don’t know! Well, actually you can but it’s a five step process that you can only under the light of the waxing gibbous moon on a Tuesday in a month starting with “M”. And we’ll turn it back on next update anyway, so fuck you. What are you gonna do, use LibreOffice?
These “innovations” and the discussions thereof clog up the newsfeeds and journalistic spaces, while being at best annoying and at worst actively hostile. Meanwhile, companies are beginning to realise that money costs money now (cause of interest rates, y’see), and are doing the thing that capital holders always do when they can’t think of any new innovations to make number go up.
Because number go up is the only game in town.
Join me next week for part 2 where I continue to complain like your grandad did when he couldn’t work the TV remote, and I talk about economic rent and pigeons. It’ll be a blast.
Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this, consider getting a copy of my book (the links are at the start of this article) or supporting my work by contributing to my ko-fi fund. you can find me on Instagram at @henryneilen_writer
The links to other books in this article are affiliate links. These will give me a small kickback if you choose to purchase, but won’t affect royalties for the authors and won’t cost you any more. It’s a good way to support my writing if you enjoy it and get something for yourself in the process.
Congrats on the release of SUNWARD SKY! I can't wait to read it soon!
Project Getaway sounds like someone I'd love to read. My TBR is definitely too full, but I'll keep an eye on it because the reflections around technology, geopolitical borders, and industry dynamics seem quite interesting, actually.
Regarding:
"When you think about it, every single major productive technology [...] has been a foreshortening of the distance, either physical or temporal, between humans and the tasks they want to accomplish."
The above is quite true. After all, we humans need interpersonal relationships and---perhaps unconsciously—that need has driven most of our discoveries, even those that are not related to technology itself.
One of the many problems with AI as it's being developed and used right now is how it exacerbates the post-truth in which we live. It'll reach a moment in which we won't be able to determine real from fiction, and it's terrifying.
An excellent essay!
In the US that game is called telephone