We will look at modern society and technologies that are often built against it.

"We live with a bounty of communications technologies at our disposal. Our culture is composed more of mediated experiences than of directly lived ones. Yet we are also more alone and atomized than ever before. Our most advanced technologies are not enhancing our connectivity, but thwarting it. They are replacing and devaluing our humanity, and — in many different ways undermining our respect for one another and ourselves. Sadly, this has been by design."

"There’s a reason for our current predicament: an antihuman agenda embedded in our technology, our markets, and our major cultural institutions, from education and religion to civics and media. It has turned them from forces for human connection and expression into ones of isolation and repression."

"We are embedding some very old and disparaging notions about human beings and their place in the natural order into our future technological infrastructure. Engineers at our leading tech firms and universities tend to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution."

"When they are not developing interfaces to control us, they are building intelligences to replace us. Any of these technologies could be steered toward extending our human capabilities and collective power. Instead, they are deployed in concert with the demands of a marketplace, political sphere, and power structure that depend on human isolation and predictability in order to operate."

"Social control is based on thwarting social contact and exploiting the resulting disorientation and despair. Human beings evolved by gaining the capacity to forge greater numbers of social connections. The development of our brain, language, text, electronic media, and digital networks were all driven by our need for higher levels of social organization."

"Thinking, feeling, connected people undermine the institutions that would control them. They always have. That’s why new mechanisms for forging bonds and cooperation between people are almost inevitably turned against those ends. Language that could inform is instead used to lie. Money that could promote trade is instead hoarded by the wealthy. Education that could expand workers’ minds is instead used to make them more efficient human resources."

"All along the way, cynical views of humans as a mindless mob, incapable of behaving intelligently and peacefully, are used to justify keeping us apart and denying us roles as autonomous actors in any of these areas of life. Our institutions and technologies aren’t designed to extend our human nature, but to mitigate or repress it."

— Douglas Rushkoff