Aidan Vanhoof

by Aidan Vanhoof

11 min read

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”

— Marshall McLuhan

Having been born in 2005, just prior to the iPhone and just in time for social media, it didn’t take long for my father to familiarize me with the internet. He taught me technological literacy from a young age. Being an engineer himself, to him, the emerging technological world was nothing except beautiful; a new, unprecedented time to explore and admire with everyone else in the world.

His love for new technology seemed genetic, as it soon revealed its nerdy little face in me. From a young age, I mirrored my father perfectly. I looked like him, still look like him, and his personality and interests were contagious, as each one infected me minutes after they did him. I dressed up as a naval engineer — his occupation — for first grade’s career day. Every Christmas, I’d receive engineering kits and electrical playthings. When considering my future, engineering was a consistent and desirable option, alongside the tragically fantastical career dreams each child has and loses as time goes on.

This lasted until the eighth grade, when, in picking between trade school or public high school, I seriously considered pursuing engineering, realized I hated it, and decided against it. Math was nihilistic to me, but writing gave me a purpose.

This made it clear that engineering wasn’t my calling. This was among the few key differences between me and him. I love philosophy and critical theory, he loves science and mathematics. I love writing and the arts, he loves experimentation and certainty. As is reflected in my pursuit of journalism, I wanted to question everything, spiral into chaotic abstract dialectics while harassing public officials. As an engineer, nothing about that was and still is appealing to him. I suspect it’s the uncertainty: I like open-ended questions, he likes something solvable.

However, we remain quite close, and as time sewed a modicum of division between us, we kept one of many similarities: technology. As an aspiring engineer, I loved watching as new technologies came out. And while a new generation of quirky, ingenious CEO’s acted as figureheads ushering us into the unknown, it felt like I was coming of age in a world just being born.

However, as Antonio Gramsci said,

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.

The Monsters of Our Time

The monsters we face today are artificial, concocted by those same geniuses I once admired. It’s an ugly and intimidating time to be shoved into adulthood.

Yet, while times have undeniably changed, that love of technology hasn’t disappeared, though maybe it’s been tinged with a clear concern for the future. I still find myself entranced by the gorgeous pictures taken with cameras orders of magnitude smaller than cameras of the same quality ten years ago. Or when I access thousands of years of learning and knowledge within seconds with unreal ease. It’s surreal living in the future envisioned by the past, with handheld computers and robotic servants capable of near-sentience.

Sometimes, if I squint hard enough or cover my ears, I can see the dream my parents raised me to believe in. When my father talked to me about politics, he’d outline to me the wonders of the market economy. Any systemic problems could be reformed away, any crisis or injustice could be brought to balance with an economy in equilibrium.

It’s not uncommon to see bits of this utopia in our current reality. ChatGPT is an astonishing research partner, my cell phone feels essential to life, and I’m writing this with an $80 keyboard.

But any amount of optimism welcomes its opposite. OpenAI pollutes unrelentingly to refine an unsupervised technological time bomb; my cell phone shouldn’t be necessary to life, and consumerism assumes fulfillment can be commodified. Each of these are blights on society, yet their convenience veils their destructive tendencies, making us complacent in the face of brazen injustice.

It’s not a problem with the products themselves. It’s a problem with why and how they’ve gone about the innovation preached to me by my father.

Convenience has come at the cost of our humanity. Per the logic of the modern world, there is no such thing as free lunch; every positive comes with a negative; each thesis comes with its antithesis.

My relationship with technology, therefore, is a mixed one. On one hand, innovation can be a symptom of deeper exploitation. On the other, it’s a wonder of human achievement. All I know, and all I believe I can know, is that the world I’m preparing to join is a daunting one. It’s uncomfortable because it’s unknown, yet in that same sense, it’s original. It’s new, unprecedented, meaning it’s scarce, and scarcity begets value.

A New Hansel & Gretel

It’s something I need to embrace. What else can I do? I can reject AI, then watch as my peers outpace me in virtually every way. I can stop using my cell phone, then cut myself off from the outside world. I can buy a typewriter and mail drafts to my editor when I’m assigned something remote. Time won’t wait for me or anyone else, no matter how much I complain about oligarchs or democratic backsliding or right-wing ideology. Politics, clearly, is a big part of my life; I think and care a lot about it. But doing something about it asks that I embrace the tools at my disposal, not cover my ears and shout.

Old-guard newspapers learned that lesson. Their business model simply hasn’t adapted to the modern age. Consequently, journalists like me are stuck with mass layoffs and a profoundly competitive job market. It’ll likely improve as the industry rebounds, but this doesn’t offer me much hope. As technology advances, will another round of layoffs happen? Will I be one of them? That is, assuming I discover solid employment after graduation.

My girlfriend, Nicole, regularly feels the same, being an art student. Together, we make an anxious pair. Yet, anxiety is an often irrational emotion. It’s an underlying concern, a nervousness nagging at you that refuses to die. Many, including myself, take medication to ease it. However, medication can’t give me a stable income or a full-time job.

I shouldn’t be surprised. Every technological revolution does the same thing: displace workers. But everyone ends up okay. Blue-collar factory work travels overseas, while white collar information processing lingers. Eventually, as the economy inflates, more blue-collar jobs migrate away, along with the domestic working class.

Jobs once filled by humans are automated, leaving little space for actual workers. Wealth is transferred upwards, making the economy richer but the people poorer. Yes, we recover from job displacement. But this time, the next time, the time after that, and so on — eventually, there won’t be jobs to displace. Only austerity.

As jobs require exponentially more education, degrees lose their value. People need degrees, so more people get degrees, making the job market ruthlessly competitive. More people fight for fewer jobs, fewer jobs mean less income. As the economy advances, the interests of the average person are swept away like dirt.

This doesn’t sound like the futuristic utopia I was promised.

The Ugliness of the Entrepreneurial Spirit

I’d love a utopia, I think we all would. So now we’re stuck questioning why everything’s lost its utopian luster. If we don’t know what to fix, we don’t know how to fix it.

My father is a centrist Democrat, but a specific kind. He hated corporate exploitation, but bent the knee to the innovation exploitation wrought. He simultaneously despised and admired the Sam Altmans and Elon Musks of the world, although Trump and his band of oligarchs, like Altman and formerly Musk, have mostly soured his view. But most of the time, technological acumen subsumed Altman’s corporate recklessness or Musk’s general purpose ignorance.

To my father and myself for most of my life, entrepreneurship gave us a potential utopia, so why not love it?

But by glorifying entrepreneurship, we deify personal, subjective greatness instead of working towards the interests of greater society. This ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ doesn’t come from me, or you, or the entrepreneur themselves. Owning a business isn’t some innate feature of the universe; it’s not bound to human nature.

It’s bound to one thing: the free market.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964),

The medium is the message.

The internet as a platform is more influential than the websites comprising it, the 24-hour news cycle as a method of information distribution has more influence than the stories it issues, and so on. I’ve been morphed into who I am today, in part by my cell phones, not so much by what I looked at on them.

Similarly, the billionaires who are so easily blamed for each and every problem my generation faces shouldn’t be blamed. They’re doing precisely what they’re supposed to do as businesspeople: inflate until they pop. It just so happens that, by turning our world into their world, the rest of the world suffers.

I don’t think I’m unreasonable to prefer something better. Something that doesn’t artificially produce and perpetuate the problems we’re trapped with, like climate change and global austerity, for profit or personal gain.

The Entrepreneurial Spirit as a Systemic Symptom

People sometimes imply my clear radical anti-capitalism is just youthful fervor. They’re probably right. As a dedicated pragmatist, my father’s responses normally orbit the efficiency of capitalism when compared to Soviet central planning, even though ironically I’m a devout anti-authoritarian myself.

But that doesn’t change the fact that framing the entrepreneurial spirit as more than a lust for profit, as if it’s a mark of creativity, bravery and daring, bothers me constantly. There’s nothing wrong with owning a business, but it doesn’t make you a knight — it makes you a soldier of fortune.

There is virtue in entrepreneurship. But it absolutely cannot be understood in isolation, so it cannot be evaluated in isolation, either. I respect those who start a business, innovate, and make the world even the slightest bit better to live in. I adore the delicious cookies baked by my local bakery, or the services from the mechanic just down the street from me. But they’re not such valuable pieces in our community for their business alone. It’s what they bring to the table that matters. They’re good because they give high-quality service while treating their employees and communities with dignity and respect. Anything else is just economic activity — virtueless in itself.

On the contrary, my father’s love for billionaire innovators wasn’t virtueless. But every second spent bowing to progress is one spent unaware of the weight it carries.

McLuhan and Marx

Nothing can be honestly understood in isolation. Likewise, media is hardly the sum of its isolated, remote parts. Marshall McLuhan was a systemic thinker. To him, history isn’t a sequence of somewhat disconnected, sporadic events or ideas, but the advancement of large-scale systems clashing against each other with monolithic antagonisms defining them.

In other words, historical materialism beautifully applied to the media landscape.

However, he deviates from Marx in one key way: to a Marxist, it’s not so much the medium defining the message, but the system defining the medium and the message simultaneously.

Marx, like McLuhan, was a pure, unadulterated systemic thinker. A culture like ours, favoring individual achievement instead of collective flourishing, is built to serve a master. Each device, each gadget and technological tidbit, doesn’t spawn from thin air. It’s made to fill a gap in the market, a gap unfilled or underappreciated by other innovators. Anything subject to the market contours to capital. The medium is shaped by capital; the message is whatever is profitable.

Marx and McLuhan are inseparable: the base-superstructure, economic determinist materialist logic Marx flourished in is precisely the same as McLuhan’s materialism and technological determinism. To Marx, the base is political economy, like corporations and the state. The superstructure comprises culture, media, and social hierarchies formed by political economy. The base is vastly more influential, as it fundamentally drives every other aspect of society.

When applied to McLuhan, the base is the medium; the superstructure is the message. The medium is vastly more influential, as it fundamentally drives every way the medium is used, i.e., the message. They don’t just correlate — McLuhan applied Marxian logic directly. Through this, McLuhan conjured a powerful framework for understanding technology.

A New Uncertainty

Moreover, like Neil Postman, we’re stuck with fear. Neil Postman opposed computers in classrooms, claiming they stripped education of its most important feature: socializing. While he died decades ago, Postman’s skepticism towards technology’s social impact extends to the modern day.

Personally, I make regular use of social media, but mostly out of necessity. The conquering of analog spaces by technology ensures we can’t function without it. Our world has been shoved into cell phones, distilled into Instagram posts and short paragraphs on X. All of which lacks connective tissue. I’m not by any means the first to say social media divides us as much as it brings us together. It’s made, ideally, to help us socialize. But by permitting us to project our ideal selves, i.e., what we think the world wants to see us become, it’s rendered a widespread clash between false identities. Like oil and water, they’re interacting, but they remain fundamentally separate.

On a more economic level, technological advancement turns collective labor solitary, as was seen with the Industrial Revolution. New divisions of labor emerged, wherein skilled tradesmen became machine operators, pulling levers and shoveling coal behind an isolating wall of smog. They no longer had to collaborate to complete a task — machines could do that for them.

Every technology is inseparable from its origins. Just as it’s an extension of ourselves, it’s also an extension of the systems realizing it. Therefore, it’s a double-edged sword: with each refinement, with each step forward, we are set back just as far.

These setbacks often attract more attention, mostly because reporters focus predominantly on said setbacks. After all, the societal good brought by a widespread knowledge of cute puppy videos is nothing compared to a government shutdown, regime change, and so on. But sometimes, we all need something. A crutch or anything soft to cushion our fall.

Specks of horror float around in my and many others’ heads, and have for decades. My father had nuclear war to worry about, after all. I yearn for a world devoid of existential threats. We all do — or at least, I hope we all do. Yet, it’s in the medium’s nature to cover the disquieting. Maybe, like a tough parent, we need a thorough sandblasting from time to time. Just because it squelches optimism, doesn’t mean it should be feared. In that way, anxiety is often a symptom of a fading indoctrination.

Despite this, my father was right to feel optimistic. Just as I walked in my father’s footprints, thinking his route was the safest, he walked in those of the media, his education, and his own parents. He was born at the tail end of America’s economic zenith, July 1969. His childhood crescendoed into the 1980s, with Reaganomics bringing new wealth and new risks. The Cold War offered a virtually flawless ideological enemy, and America appeared to be on top of the world.

During this time, the Bretton Woods Agreement died, spurring the slow decline of American capitalism to be replaced with what philosopher Yanis Varoufakis calls techno-feudalism. Under techno-feudalism, capital flows, not from private property, but from near-monopolistic control over distribution (e.g., Amazon), control over the flow of money (e.g., Wall Street, banking, etc.), and financial domination over computation (e.g., Silicon Valley). Applying Marx once again, he wouldn’t seek to “seize the means of production” anymore, but the means of computation and financial gatekeeping.

My father’s and my own indoctrination alike don’t demand a totalitarian state — indoctrination shapeshifts according to its role. It’s materialistic, as in, it takes the form of commodities. And it’s symbolic, as in, it disguises. For example, the recoloring of greed via the worship of enterprise and the fruits thereof as “vision” or “ambition”.

My father grew up in a world wherein optimism was the only rational response. I’m growing up in a world hinged on the opposite. Everything about the modern world, with its searing bright lights and pessimistic futurism, tells us one thing: something isn’t right. Or, at the very least, I hope something isn’t right. If everything is as it should be, nothing can be as it needs to be.