For our purposes here, objectifying “things”—whether for scientific identification, economic ownership, or social control—decontextualizes them from the systems of which they are a part.

Any solution that involves valuing human labor risks slowing things down.

Players at this level are pursuing a very particular kind of wealth. It’s not based on dividends, regenerative markets, or the circulation of money through the system. It’s simple conquest and extraction. Find either a new territory to conquer and dominate, or a new technology through which to extract more than you already do.

The rhetoric of Silicon Valley—whether in the pitch decks of young developers, the talks by TED speakers, or the Joe Rogan interviews with tech billionaires—always bears the same hallmarks as these business plans. Progress. The future. Optimism. Transformation. Winning. But usually these are just euphemisms for conquest, colonization, domination, a

Whether we’re talking about a smart finance grid, biohacking, drone warfare, space colonization, or universal basic income, technosolutions are too commonly informed by the values inherent in technology itself: exponential growth, automation over human intervention, forward momentum, platformization, and a disregard for existing conditions on the g

This drive toward totalitarian technocracy is what educator and media theorist Neil Postman called technopoly, the “submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.”

The more value is extracted, the fewer opportunities people have to create and exchange value through any means other than participating in the systems of domination and control that have robbed them in the first place. Locals can resist by adopting the violent tactics of their oppressors, but this risks infecting them with the same sensibilities.

However we may slice it, The Mindset favors the extraordinary achievements of wealthy individuals using technology to set themselves apart from the common folk, control the natural environment, and overcome the cycles of life.

What the technologists working at the very heart of the world’s biggest tech companies realize, however, is just how disempowering such individuation can be.