“This new attitude toward life can be expressed more specifically in the following principles: Man's development requires his capacity to transcend the narrow prison of his ego, his greed, his selfishness, his separation from his fellow man, and, hence, his basic loneliness. This transcendence is the condition for being open and related to the world, vulnerable, and yet with an experience of identity and integrity; of man's capacity to enjoy all that is alive, to pour out his faculties into the world around him, to be "interested", in brief, to be rather than to have and to use are consequences of the step to overcome greed and egomania.”
- Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope
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I want to tell you a story about two guys named Steve and how they saved the internet. In 2014, there was a massive data breach across numerous spaces of the web, which included user information and passwords. It was tied to something known as the Heartbleed bug, a major coding issue within OpenSSL, an open source software toolkit that is “the default encryption engine used by much of the internet,” according to journalist Chris Stokel-Walker. To give you a sense of just how important OpenSSL is, every time you put your password into Netflix or complete a credit card transaction at a public terminal, you’re likely going through processes assisted by OpenSSL. Steve Henson and Steve Marquess, or as I like to call them, the Two Steves, were instrumental in the development of OpenSSL and remained active in its upkeep until their departures in 2017. Marquess, in particular, set up the OpenSSL Foundation in 2009 to provide a stable footing for its maintenance. They have done all of this work as a public service, either as government contractors or volunteers. With the Heartbleed bug meltdown, the Two Steves worked overtime, with Henson assisting in revising code with other developers and Marquess facilitating contacts with businesses and government agencies. As a result, the Heartbleed panic was largely resolved and the internet lived to fight another day.
Despite their herculean efforts, OpenSSL continues to be underfunded and understaffed, all while threats to cybersecurity are still rampant. As Stokel-Walker wrote in his article on the two Steves, “Right now significant parts of the internet’s cryptographic security rely on a tiny handful of people who are already stretched to the limits. If that fails, the modern world as we know it could cease to work as it should.” While we should all be appreciative of the work by the Two Steves and many others who make the internet a safer place, the story of OpenSSL demonstrates how precarious some of the foundational aspects of the internet really are. I’m also telling you this story about the Two Steves for another fundamental reason: technology is best served when passionate and dedicated human beings control its destiny. The problems of OpenSSL were caused by humans and were only resolved by humans.
We live in a world vastly different from what our parents and grandparents grew up in. We can move information at the speed of light, connect with anyone around the world, and provide the wealth of human knowledge to untold millions. Yet, like the story of OpenSSL, there’s a sense in which our lives are more precarious. Security breaches, misinformation, and social media silos challenge our identities, our communities, and in some instances, challenge democracy itself. Five companies (Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft) effectively control how the majority of humanity interacts with technology, from e-commerce and social media to internet searches and smart devices. While our lives have been improved in numerous ways by their products, they’ve also been harmed in more subtle ways. Companies like Meta make their money via advertising, which is tailored to people via endless amounts of user data, very little of which we have control over. Google has been deemed a monopoly by Federal courts, using its outsized role in the marketplace to effectively dominate internet searches and online advertising. And Amazon, with its AWS cloud products, continued to grow larger via lucrative contracts with the US Department of Defense.
These staggering changes are only magnified by the development of generative artificial intelligence (AI). Companies like Anthropic and OpenAI dominate the discussion on technology, promising us generative AI tools that will vastly increase our capacity to solve problems like creative writing, automation, and anthropogenic climate change. Yet, these companies find it difficult to generate a profit and, through their massive buildout of data centers to facilitate AI’s demands, actually exacerbate the climate crisis. Google’s emissions grew by nearly 50% in the last five years, and Microsoft saw their energy use climb 30% in just three years. Alongside all the energy needed to fuel data centers for AI, you also need water to cool them down, and this has led to astronomical uses of water. As Fortune reported last year, every single time a person completes 5-50 queries via ChatGPT, it uses 16 ounces of water, while many parts of the world are facing extreme drought conditions, heat waves, and catastrophic storms as a result of climate breakdown. And all of this is in the service of a technology that doesn’t work particularly well. A small pilot study by researchers Robert Cummings, Guy Krueger, Susan Nicholas, and Susan Wood suggests that students using ChatGPT with a Wikipedia plugin that provides additional sources doesn’t help them select higher quality sources or assist them in integrating those sources into their writing. Why are we wasting so many precious natural resources for a software that can’t even improve college essays?
It is safe to say that the way humanity uses technology is vastly out of step with our real human needs and the biosphere in which we live. We need a different paradigm to move us forward, one that is predicated on humanism, which advocates for building a society dedicated to the full flourishing of all humanity. Fortunately for us there is one, and it comes from a psychologist nearly 60 years ago.
Erich Fromm was born in 1900 in Frankfurt, Germany and grew up in an orthodox Jewish family who valued the community that their faith gave them. From early on, his experiences pushed him towards three guiding ideologies: humanism, socialism, and psychoanalysis. Ever the religious skeptic, Fromm rejected the orthodox Judaism of his family yet retained many of the moral and intellectual precepts derived from his study of the faith. This stemmed from his years of religious education with tutor Salman Baruch Rabinkow, whom Fromm said “influenced my life more than any other man, perhaps, and, although in different forms and concepts, his ideas have remained alive in me.” Thus, Fromm’s articulation of humanism always drew from the vast well of wisdom from religious teachings and myth.
The second guiding light was his socialism, which was deeply influenced by the reading of Karl Marx, especially the philosopher’s early writings. As Fromm wrote of Marx in 1974:
What drew me to him was primarily his philosophy and his vision of socialism, which expressed, in secular forms, the idea of human self-realization, of total humanization, the idea of a human being whose goal is vital self-expression and not the acquisition and accumulation of dead, material things.
Fromm dedicated himself to the cause of socialism for decades, challenging the capitalism of the United States while rejecting Soviet Communism. At the height of the Cold War, Fromm assisted in founding the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) in 1957. The name was inspired by his book, The Sane Society (1955), wherein he argued for a reenergized commitment to ethical conduct in the face of rapid technological change.
The third and final outlook that Fromm pulled from was psychoanalysis, the field of psychology founded by Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis, in a basic sense, is a study of the mind’s unconscious drives, desires, and dispositions— and how they relate to a person’s conscious life. Fromm’s interest in psychoanalysis began with his first wife, Frieda Reichmann, who introduced Fromm to Freud’s ideas. He later studied at the Psychoanalytic Institute in Berlin with prominent theorists of the field. What made his approach to psychoanalysis different from many of his contemporaries, including Freud himself, was his background in sociology, rather than medicine. This would shape Fromm’s own interpretation of psychoanalysis, which placed much more emphasis on the social, political, and economic forces which drove human behavior rather than on merely the mechanistic, biological drives of individuals. Despite these three strains of thought being a core component to his identity, Fromm eschewed individual labels, except for one. As biographer Peter Kramer wrote, “He took what he needed— and enthusiastically— from Judaism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and later, Taoism and Zen Buddhism, but Fromm was finally a humanist.”
In 1968, he published The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology. Written in the heady days of Eugene McCarthy’s campaign for president, which challenged sitting President Lyndon Johnson and US involvement in Vietnam, Fromm’s manifesto called for a complete reimagining of our relationship to technology. In the introduction, he echoes Marx and lays out the challenge faced in his time, which we sadly still face today. “A specter is stalking in our midst whom only a few see with clarity,” he wrote, “It is not the old ghost of communism or fascism. It is a new specter: a completely mechanized society, devoted to maximal material output and consumption, directed by computers; and in this social process, man himself is being transformed into a part of the total machine, well fed and entertained, yet passive, unalive, and with little feeling.” As we leave more and more of our lives to the application of digital technologies, we lose some of our own agency. This makes our society more passive and less willing to actively participate in the functioning of our communities.
To challenge this paradigm, in Fromm’s estimation, requires one indispensable element: a commitment to hope. “Hope is a decisive element in any attempt to bring about social change in the direction of greater aliveness, awareness, and reason,” he noted. However, a commitment to hope is one not divorced from the real challenges of life but attempts to address them head on, acknowledging we may not succeed in our own lifetimes. “To hope,” Fromm wrote, “means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.” Realizing that the fruits of our efforts may come long after we’re gone requires us to not lose hope, to grapple with the challenge of hopelessness, since hopelessness in our age “is covered up as optimism, and in a few, as revolutionary nihilism.” We must strive for what literary theorist Terry Eagleton called “hope without optimism,” a steadfast dedication to hope that is not blinded by the twin chimeras of unrealistic optimism and self-defeating nihilism.
Decades before the generative AI trend we see today, Fromm actually outlined how a thinking computer might work and its implications for society. He wrote:
One symptom of the attraction of the merely mechanical is the growing popularity, among some scientists and the public, of the idea that it will be possible to construct computers which are no different from man in thinking, feeling, or any other aspect of functioning. The main problem, it seems to me, is not whether such a computer-man can be constructed; it is rather why the idea is becoming so popular in a historical period when nothing seems to be more important than to transform the existing man into a more rational, harmonious, and peace-loving being. One cannot help being suspicious that often the attraction of the computer-man idea is the expression of a flight from life and from humane experience into the mechanical and purely cerebral.
In silicon-valley today, there’s a growing trend of leaders, from OpenAI’s Sam Altman to Elon Musk, who yearn for something called the “singularity” — that is, a merging of the biological and technological. In other words, humans can upload their consciousness to a computer and escape the finality of death. While it’s presumptuous to assume that this is even possible, as the human mind is so complex, it’s also anti-humanistic. In a world where so many live on so little, with poverty, disease, and inequality rampant, why isn’t our dedication to improving the lives of real human beings rather than attempting to merge human and machine? These ideas are the consequence of a mechanized society that is continually divorcing itself from reality and the qualities that make us human. As Fromm wrote, “When the majority of men are like robots, then indeed there will be no problem in building robots who are like men.”
In the latter part of the book, Fromm provides us with an alternative, one that places technology firmly in the service of conscious, moral human beings. “Machines and computers should become a functional part in a life-oriented social system and not a cancer which begins to play havoc and eventually kills the system. Machines or computers must become means for ends which are determined by man's reason and will.” What does this different future look like? As a start, the economy must come under the control of the people, in the service of meeting human needs, rather than merely to generate a profit and grow the economy. “Corporation planning,” wrote Fromm, “must be subject to control by the government, workers and consumers; in other words, those for whom industry plans must have voice in the decisions of industry.” This is what he calls “humanistic management,” a “method is that, in spite of the bigness of the enterprises, centralized planning, and cybernation, the individual participant asserts himself toward the managers, circumstances, and machines, and ceases to be a powerless particle which has no active part in the process. Only by such affirmation of his will can the energies of the individual be liberated and his mental balance be restored.”
Alongside a reimagining of the economy, Fromm also provided suggestions on reimagining democracy and the role of the engaged citizen, the basic foundation of which was education. “On the basis of the facts, the informed, thoughtful, and critical citizen is capable of getting the basic information which he needs to form a picture of the fundamental issues,” Fromm argued. Building on this, Fromm went further, advocating for universal public services that would provide citizens with their basic needs:
. . . a person has an inalienable right to live a right to which no conditions are attached and which implies the right to receive the basic commodities necessary for life, the right to education and to medical care. . . Provided this principle were accepted, if a man, woman, or adolescent could be sure that whatever he did his material existence would not be in jeopardy, but the realm of human freedom would be immensely enhanced.
This ‘immense enhancement’ of human freedom, tied to the expansion of social democratic rights, gives citizens the opportunity to pursue their own passions, talents, and goals, releasing them forever from the shackles of economic precarity.
As citizens become well-read and well-fed, they will build a society based on empathy, compassion, democracy, and the free development of all. This would potentially lead us beyond the parochialism of our age, full of nationalist fervor and stifling in-group identities, and towards what Fromm called the “solidarity of all men and the loyalty to life and to humanity which must always take precedence over the loyalty to any particular group.” In Fromm’s view, these developments would be a “cultural revolution that attempts to transform the spirit of alienation and passivity characteristic of technological society; the aim of this transformation is a new man whose goal in life is being, not having and using, one who aims at the full development of his powers of love and reason, and who achieves a new unity between thought and effect . . . .” Thus, technology would be deployed in the service of humanistic ends rather than destructive ends and a new era of social and personal growth would begin.
In keeping with Fromm’s recommendations, there are many things that we can do to move us toward a technologically humanistic society. First, we must resist the allure of generative AI. From energy and resource use to limited use cases, it is clear that the costs far outweigh the benefits. When you’re writing something, don’t use ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini AI; write your ideas yourself. You’ll not only enjoy it more, as writing is a very cathartic experience, but you’ll likely think through your ideas more clearly. Another neat trick you can do is something my wife showed me the other day. If you want to go a Google search the old-fashioned way, just type in your query and add “-ai” at the end. Doing that will remove the AI overview at the top and give you good, reputable search results and works more quickly. A web extension for Chrome can also be downloaded that does this automatically. My hope for the world is that generative AI is a fad, the speculative bubble fueling it will burst, and we will return to a more sensible policy of conducting internet searches and completing creative work.
Second, the United States government needs to enforce existing antitrust law and break big tech up. The big five companies I mentioned earlier—Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft— clearly meet the criteria of monopolies and should be split into different companies. For example, Google’s ad business and its search business should be separate companies, rather than two parts of the same whole that stifles competition. Amazon’s cloud services should be a separate venture from its e-commerce business, as its outsized influence over the economy pushes smaller competitors out of the market, especially third-party sellers. The United States prides itself on having a free market economy, but it’s nothing of the sort, especially in tech. Real competition and innovation comes when companies that are considered ‘too big to fail’ are broken up. If you need any indication that this is true, reflect on the last time the United States broke up a corporation: AT&T in 1982. Undoing AT&T’s stranglehold on the telecommunications market arguably created the conditions for the development of the internet and the technological revolution of the last four decades. That could happen again if we break up big tech.
Third, and most importantly, we need to advocate for economic and social democracy. Like Fromm advocated decades ago, we should move towards a society that provides universal basic services—food, clothing, housing, medical care, education—and transition the economy towards public and worker ownership. For the latter, one promising form this could take is the worker cooperative model, used throughout the United States and the world. Two examples of this are the Mondragon Corporation of Spain, a highly successful worker cooperative of 70,000 worker-owners, and BSA LifeStructures, an architectural firm based in Indianapolis structured as an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). BSA boasts of hundreds of worker-owners, whose individual success means the larger success of the enterprise, and their work centers on public health, education, and social betterment. Imagine if our whole economy functioned like BSA and Mondragon and was supported by robust public goods and universal basic services. It would lead to vast human flourishing guided by conscious and socially-responsible technological development. It may also give us the chance to combat the climate crisis, saving our world for future generations to come.
Today we face a choice, one that Fromm anticipated all those years ago. “We are at the crossroads:,” he wrote, “one road leads to a completely mechanized society with man as a helpless cog in the machine—if not to destruction by thermonuclear war; the other to a renaissance of humanism and hope—to a society that puts technique in the service of man's well-being.” I believe that the path of humanism and hope outlined by Fromm is our chance to rebuild the world for human beings, rather than machines. It only takes us imagining a better world and then advocating for it.
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“For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope.”
"It is not up to us to complete the task, but we have no right to abstain from it."
- Mischna Pirke Aboth, or the Ethical Teachings of the Fathers