Thirty-five years ago, a Canadian named Ursula Franklin offered a dark prophecy. She predicted that unfettered technological development could strip us of the capacity to honor our fellow citizens’ very humanity. In such a world, she taught, democracy will become increasingly untenable — because liberal humanism is impossible to cultivate in a society dominated by atomizing, market-serving technologies.
In January, 2025 America bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the dark world she foresaw. (She called that world an “unlivable techno-dump”). And yet, given the extent to which digital technology shapes our lives — our politics, our pocketbooks, our schools, our sex — Americans care astonishingly little about it.
In a Morning Consult poll of voters’ priorities after the presidential election, a whopping two percent of respondents declared “regulating technology companies” a top priority — even lower than respondents who listed “maintaining global security” and “other, please specify.” The Kids and Online Safety Act, which would establish a bare modicum of liability for social media platforms which facilitate harm to their youngest users, failed to pass at the end of the most recent Congress. Hardly anyone noticed.
Yet the architects and funders of these platforms are poised to exercise the most direct control over American politics than any other social contingent since the Gilded Age. Marc Andreessen, the computer scientist and investor whose firm Andreessen Horowitz dominates the Silicon Valley economy, interviewed candidates for major roles in the second Trump White House. Larry Ellison, co-founder of the behemoth Oracle Corporation, is a regular at Mar-a-Lago. And of course, cringe-kitsch futurist extraordinaire Elon Musk is among Trump’s most powerful advisors, a position secured after marshaling the full weight of his social media platform X in service of Trump’s re-election.
How can our electorate remain so uninterested in the digital nerve centers which construct our lives, our identities, even our thoughts?
In 1989 — before most of these systems existed, when Musk was still an exchange student cleaning out grain bins in Saskatchewan — Ursula Franklin predicted all of this. Franklin was a metallurgist, professor, and Quaker activist whose German family was torn asunder by the Holocaust. In that year she was invited, as part of the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s acclaimed Massey Lectures, to deliver a broadside against the alliance between the state and the tech sector titled “The Real World of Technology.” She argued persuasively that their citizens of modernity were in danger of losing the ability to shape, or even to make intelligible, the world in which they lived and worked.
Franklin foretold that unchecked automation would degrade the dignity of work, that anonymized social technologies would forestall any possibility of human connection, and that governments would bend to digital capitalists and arms-dealers. At the end of the Cold War, she saw that the conflict’s emphasis on geopolitical superiority would neuter a self-sufficient, self-governing democratic North America. And, she made plain, the possibility of avoiding this was slim:
It is my conviction that nothing short of a global reformation of major social forces and of the social contract can end this historical period of profound and violent transformations, and give a manner of security to the world and its citizens. Such a development will require the redefinition of rights and responsibilities, and the setting of limits to power and control. There have to be completely different criteria for what is permissible and what is not.
Three and a half decades later, her warnings remain ignored. Franklin’s “real world” has been realized, and it determines the parameters of American citizens’ political imaginations, ideologies, and discourse. We hardly have the tools to understand our own disenfranchisement. Americans today take the current arc of technological development — and supremacy — for granted. In such a world, is there still hope for a saner and more authentically democratic world?
Franklin’s philosophy borrows first and foremost from the patron saint of eclectic 20th- and 21st-century social analysis: Michel Foucault.
She drew heavily from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. In “The Real World of Technology,” Franklin insisted on a continuity of power — from the eighteenth century’s eccentric politics of biological control, to the Industrial Revolution’s Taylorist factory regimentation, to the modern social split between the vast managerial class responsible for deciding what machines should do and the people left to execute their orders.
Invoking Foucault, Franklin argues that industry makes “docile” bodies which do what benefits the system without being told. Those people, she wrote, are conditioned by inflexible, “prescriptive” technologies, which she contrasted with more “holistic,” person-centered tools. “To plan with and for technology became the Industrial Revolution’s strongest dream,” she wrote, noting that two hundred years after Charles Babbage yearned for an automated factory, it had finally come to fruition in the de-industrializing 1980s. And lo and behold: Amazon introduced “Proteus,” its first fully autonomous warehouse robot, in 2022, six years after Franklin’s death.
Prescriptive technologies are “control” technologies that engender compliance. A global economy demands production at scale, which demands uniformity, both in product and in person. Franklin was no Luddite, and she did believe pro-social technological development was possible in theory. But she was firm that it was rare, describing a world where the profitability of the production model takes precedence over the actual value of the widget it produces. In such a system, the government is transformed into industry’s mute handmaiden, handing over billions of dollars in subsidies (and clearing the environmental decks) for corporations to build new products that make them richer than Croesus.
Sometimes the products are good for the citizens! Even then, this dynamic is undemocratic. Franklin drew a distinction between “divisible” and “indivisible” benefits, the latter category falls within the government’s purview and encompasses “common goods” like clean air, public sanitation, and transportation infrastructure. Corporations should never be responsible for meeting these needs. Even if corporations’ investments indirectly benefit the citizenry, she wrote — by, to use a contemporary example, providing broadband to rural citizens, or heavy-duty computing power to research universities — this dynamic still corrupts democracy and degrades the status of “citizen.”
In the final lecture of the 1989 series, Franklin laid out a checklist to determine whether a democratic society should empower any specific technology. Criteria to consider, she stipulated, included whether the technology in questions “restores reciprocity,” “favours people over machines,” and whether its benefits redound to the common good more than to its parent company. Who is making these checklists today?
Franklin published a coda to “The Real World of Technology” in 1999 in which she addressed the rise of the internet. She was particularly concerned with its impact on what she called, in the original lectures, “reciprocity” — the personal flow of attention and dignity attendant to all direct, non-intermediated communication between two human beings.
When the first major social media platforms emerged from the primordial soup of LiveJournal, Friendster and MySpace, they were touted as the most powerful agents for human connection since the telephone. Facebook’s “Chairs” advertisement — which aired in 2012 as part of the company’s first major marketing push — featured warm conversations at a dinner party, in a park, at children’s bedtime, made the case that Facebook was simply the latest technology for human connection.
Franklin would have been skeptical. Her original complaint about pre-internet telecommunications was that they leave “no room for reciprocity.” She called this mode of discourse “asynchronous” communications (then, email or posts on listservs and forums, now, social media) and claimed they prohibit intimacy. A social media page, no matter how cuddly and welcoming the design, is always atomizing.
And atomization is a by-product of modern technologies on and off the web. As asynchronous communications technologies supplant our connections to the synchronous world, technological innovations also disconnect production from its source. A globalized economy gives us avocados in March in Flint, Michigan, and Ford trucks assembled in Mexico City. As Franklin taught, these technologies shape our world. E-mail and the North American Free Trade Agreement are two sides of the same coin, with advances in communications and global logistics respectively treated as self-justifying reasons to empower corporations. The same profit incentives that create the bombs and send them overseas also put the screen into the phone on which you watch them make landfall.
Franklin and her philosophical allies foresaw the effect this would have on democracy. In 1989 she lamented: “the right to change our mental environment — to change the constructs of our minds and the sounds around us — seems to have been given away without anybody’s consent.” Franklin was echoing fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan who, in 1964, observed that “Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.” Developments in digital communications and artificial intelligence, they warned, threaten a soft coup of the mind.
What does a digital mind-coup look like?
Rather like the public indifference toward Elon Musk’s governance of X, a platform that at the time of this writing has roughly 30 million daily active users in the United States alone. According to reporting from the Wall Street Journal, the platform heavily favored content related to Donald Trump and other right-wing topics in the months before the 2024 presidential election. And it looks like the mass outrage that accompanied the TikTok ban, which led American users to embrace harsh Chinese speech norms on another Chinese-owned app simply so they could register their protest and get their digital fix.
Musk’s leadership of X is dangerous because he uses it to manufacture authority. At the helm of this platform he claims to speak for “the people,” by which he means his users. And because X cornered the market and serves as our national marketplace of ideas, Musk wields his ownership of the platform as a digital plebiscite. He is the fulfillment of businessman and independent presidential candidate Ross Perot’s dream of governance via television, as the writer John Ganz has noted.
AI accelerates all of this. AI-inspired philosophers like Nick Bostrom argue that it is a category error to value human consciousness over a machine’s — that this mistake sells “machine consciousness” short. This argument is in itself dangerous: To preserve a human-centered, reciprocal, democratic society requires an affirmation of the inherent value of human life and spirit. But the possibility of humanistic resistance is even slimmer than it was when Franklin first spoke in 1989. The machines won. We live in their world.
I was introduced to Franklin’s writings in late 2023 by Meredith Whittaker, a former Google engineer and co-founder of New York University’s AI Now Institute, which researches AI’s social impact. Whittaker, who is now president of the non-profit encrypted messaging app Signal, described to me how when she came across Franklin’s work during her time at Google she found it reassuring. As she put it, “in an environment where I didn’t have many peers who were thinking about the same things I was that I wasn’t crazy.”
Whittaker is a shepherd of one of the few technologies designed with Franklin’s warnings in mind. Signal is advertising and data tracking-free — that is, it recalls the relative intimacy and privacy of a telephone. There are other bright spots in the digital landscape: Reddit, whatever flaws it might have, has become an indispensable resource for the kind of hyperspecific, personal, crowdsourced wisdom that an AI model could never generate; Wikipedia, the internet’s crown jewel, remains invaluable due to the rigorous, open collaboration and consensus that governs it.
Given those technologies’ near-universal approval ratings from their users, why do their corrosive, for-profit equivalents remain dominant? Why has a popular movement for technological self-governance failed to coalesce — something akin to the political movement inspired by the urbanist Jane Jacobs? Why, to return to our original question, don’t people care?
While “The Real World of Technology” is bracing and direct, Franklin’s answer to this question is implicit. The lectures are shot through with her fierce moral vision rooted in Quakerism, which she came to as an adult as a spiritual extension of her pacifist and feminist beliefs. Her insistence on the fundamental dignity of human life, and therefore on a world of technology which centers the human experience, is rooted in a deep, redemptive humanism.
That humanism is near-impossible to cultivate at the collective level required for social action, given the bleak conditions of our current digital public square. The technocratic mindset that Franklin described has helped to replace humanistic society with a material relativism which disables users from even imagining an alternative to the stranglehold digital platforms have on our minds.
Instead of insisting that North Americans adopt her moral vision, Franklin remained a committed liberal pluralist, informed by her belief in individual rights and freedoms. Citizens of this century have had occasion to learn that anti-democratic technologies empower (and create) anti-democratic minds, and anti-democratic minds are the ones designing our future. (Anti-democratic praxis is not limited to reactionary politics: the 2024 Romanian presidential election, which resulted in the election of a far-right candidate, was nullified on the basis of trumped-up concerns that Romanians were brainwashed by TikTok into voting for him.)
Franklin’s combination of affirmative morality and liberal tolerance is rare in the world we’ve made, and which she warned us about three and a half decades ago. But meaningful opposition — shaping this world, not ceding its construction to unelected Silicon Valley developers and investors — is dependent on resurrecting that combination. Franklin’s humanism will be part of our salvation.