How a 30-year-old techno-thriller predicted our digital isolation

In April, Mark Zuckerberg, as tech billionaires are so fond of doing these days, pontificated at punishing length on a podcast. In the interview, he addressed America’s loneliness epidemic: “The average American has—I think it’s fewer than three friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it’s like 15 friends or something, right?”

Before you’ve had a moment to register the ominous way in which he frames human connection in such bleak economic terms, he offers his solution to the loneliness epidemic: AI friends. Ideally AI friends his company generates.

“It’s like I’m not even me anymore.”
—Angela Bennett, The Net (1995)

Thirty years ago, Irwin Winkler’s proto–cyber thriller, The Net, was released. It was 1995, commonly regarded as the year Hollywood discovered the internet. Sandra Bullock played a social recluse and computer nerd for hire named Angela Bennett, who unwittingly uncovers a sinister computer security conspiracy. She soon finds her life turned upside down as the conspiracists begin systematically destroying her credibility and reputation. Her job, home, finances, and very identity are seemingly erased with some judicial tweaks to key computer records.

Bennett is uniquely—conveniently, perhaps—well positioned for this identity annihilation. Her mother, in the throes of dementia, no longer recognizes her; she works from home for clients who have never met her; her social circle is limited to an online chat room; she orders takeout from Pizza.net; her neighbors don’t even know what she looks like. Her most reliable companion is the screen in front of her. A wild, unimaginable scenario that I’m sure none of us can relate to.

“Just think about it. Our whole world is sitting there on a computer. It’s in the computer, everything: your DMV records, your Social Security, your credit cards, your medical records. It’s all right there. Everyone is stored in there. It’s like this little electronic shadow on each and every one of us, just begging for someone to screw with, and you know what? They’ve done it to me, and you know what? They’re gonna do it to you.”
—Angela Bennett, The Net

While the villain of The Net is ultimately a nefarious cybersecurity software company, the film’s preoccupying fear is much more fundamental: If all of our data is digitized, what happens if the people with access to that information tamper with it? Or weaponize it against us? 

This period of Hollywood’s flirtation with the internet is often referred to as the era of the technophobic thriller, but that’s a surface-level misreading. Techno-skeptic might be more accurate. These films were broadly positive and excited about new technology; it almost always played a role in how the hero saved the day. Their bigger concern was with the humans who had ultimate control of these tools, and what oversight and restrictions we should place on them.

In 2025, however, the most prescient part of The Net is Angela Bennett’s digital alienation. What was originally a series of plausible enough contrivances to make the theft of her identity more believable is now just part of our everyday lives. We all bank, shop, eat, work, and socialize without necessarily seeing another human being in person. And we’ve all been through covid lockdowns where that isolation was actively encouraged. For a whole generation of young people who lived through that, socializing face to face is not second nature. In 2023, the World Health Organization declared loneliness to be a pressing global health threat, estimating that one in four older adults experience social isolation and between 5% and 15% of adolescents experience loneliness. In the US, social isolation may threaten public health more seriously than obesity. 

The Net appeared at a time when the internet was only faintly understood as the new Wild West … In that sense, it remains a fascinating time capsule of a moment when the possibilities to come felt endless, the outlook cautiously optimistic.

We also spend increasing amounts of time looking at our phones, where finely tuned algorithms aggressively lobby for more and more of our ad-revenue-­generating attention. As Bennett warns: “Our whole lives are on the computer, and they knew that I could be vanished. They knew that nobody would care, that nobody would understand.” In this sense, in 2025 we are all Angela Bennett. As Bennett’s digital alienation makes her more vulnerable to pernicious actors, so too are we increasingly at risk from those who don’t have, and have never had, our best interests at heart. 

To blame technology entirely for a rise in loneliness—as many policymakers are doing—would be a mistake. While it is unquestionably playing a part in exacerbating the problem, its outsize role in our lives has always reflected larger underlying factors. In Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World (2024), the journalist Dan Hancox examines the ways in which crowds have been demonized and othered by those in power and suggests that our alienation is much more structural: “Whether through government cuts or concessions to the expansive ambitions of private enterprise, a key reason we have all become a bit more crowd-shy in recent decades is the prolonged, top-down assault on public space and the wider public realm—what are sometimes called the urban commons. From properly funded libraries to pleasant, open parks and squares, free or affordable sports and leisure facilities, safe, accessible and cheap public transport, comfortable street furniture and free public toilets, and a vibrant, varied, uncommodified social and cultural life—all the best things about city life fall under the heading of the public realm, and all of them facilitate and support happy crowds rather than sad, alienated, stay-at-home loners.”

Nearly half a century ago Margaret Thatcher laid out the neoliberal consensus that would frame the next decades of individualism: “There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.” 

TOM HUMBERSTONE

In keeping with that philosophy, social connectivity has been outsourced to tech companies for which the attention economy is paramount. “The Algo” is our new, capricious god. If your livelihood depends on engagement, the temptation is to stop thinking about human connection when you post, and to think more about what will satisfy The Algo to ensure a good harvest. 

How much will you trust an AI chatbot powered by Meta to be your friend? Answers to this may vary. Even if you won’t, other people are already making close connections with “AI companions” or “falling in love” with ChatGPT. The rise of “cognitive offloading”—of people asking AI to do their critical thinking for them—is already well underway, with many high school and college students admitting to a deep reliance on the technology. 

Beyond the obvious concern that AI “friends” are hallucinating, unthinking, obsequious algorithms that will never challenge you in the way a real friend might, it’s also worth remembering who AI actually works for. Recently Elon Musk’s own AI chatbot, Grok, was given new edicts that caused it to cast doubt on the Holocaust and talk about “white genocide” in response to unrelated prompts—a reminder, if we needed it, that these systems are never neutral, never apolitical, and always at the command of those with their hands on the code. 

I’m fairly lucky. I live with my partner and have a decent community of friends. But I work from home and can spend the majority of the day not talking to anyone. I’m not immune to feeling isolated, anxious, and powerless as I stare unblinking at my news feed. I think we all feel it. We are all Angela Bennett. Weaponizing that alienation, as the antagonists of The Net do, can of course be used for identity theft. But it can also have much more deleterious applications: Our loneliness can be manipulated to make us consume more, work longer, turn against ourselves and each other. AI “friendships,” if engaged with uncritically, are only going to supercharge this disaffection and the ways in which it can be abused.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can withhold our attention, practice healthier screen routines, limit our exposure to doomscrolling, refuse to engage with energy-guzzling AI, delete our accounts. But, crucially, we can also organize collectively IRL: join a union or a local club, ask our friends if they need to talk. Hopelessness is what those in power want us to feel, so resist it.

The Net appeared at a time when the internet was only faintly understood as the new Wild West. Before the dot-com boom and bust, before Web 2.0, before the walled gardens and the theory of a “dead internet.” In that sense, it remains a fascinating time capsule of a moment when the possibilities to come felt endless, the outlook cautiously optimistic.

We can also see The Net’s influence in modern screen-life films like Searching, Host, Unfriended, and The Den. But perhaps—hopefully—its most enduring legacy will be inviting us to go outside, touch grass, talk to another human being, and organize. 

“Find the others.”
—Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human (2019)

Tom Humberstone is a comic artist and illustrator based in Edinburgh.

The quest to defend against tech in intimate partner violence

After Gioia had her first child with her then husband, he installed baby monitors throughout their Massachusetts home—to “watch what we were doing,” she says, while he went to work. She’d turn them off; he’d get angry. By the time their third child turned seven, Gioia and her husband had divorced, but he still found ways to monitor her behavior. One Christmas, he gave their youngest a smartwatch. Gioia showed it to a tech-savvy friend, who found that the watch had a tracking feature turned on. It could be turned off only by the watch’s owner—her ex.

“What am I supposed to tell my daughter?” says Gioia, who is going by a pseudonym in this story out of safety concerns. “She’s so excited but doesn’t realize [it’s] a monitoring device for him to see where we are.” In the end, she decided not to confiscate the watch. Instead, she told her daughter to leave it at home whenever they went out together, saying that this way it wouldn’t get lost. 

Gioia says she has informed a family court of this and many other instances in which her ex has used or appeared to use technology to stalk her, but so far this hasn’t helped her get full custody of her children. The court’s failure to recognize these tech-facilitated tactics for maintaining power and control has left her frustrated to the point where she yearns for visible bruises. “I wish he was breaking my arms and punching me in the face,” she says, “because then people could see it.”

People I spoke with for this article described combating tech-facilitated abuse as playing “whack-a-mole.” Just as you figure out how to alert people to smartphone location sharing, enter smart cars.

This sentiment is unfortunately common among people experiencing what’s become known as TFA, or tech-­facilitated abuse. Defined by the National Network to End Domestic Violence as “the use of digital tools, online platforms, or electronic devices to control, harass, monitor, or harm someone,” these often invisible or below-the-radar methods include using spyware and hidden cameras; sharing intimate images on social media without consent; logging into and draining a partner’s online bank account; and using device-based location tracking, as Gioia’s ex did with their daughter’s smartwatch.

Because technology is so ubiquitous, TFA occurs in most cases of intimate partner violence. And those whose jobs entail protecting victims and survivors and holding abusive actors accountable struggle to get a handle on this multi­faceted problem. An Australian study from October 2024, which drew on in-depth interviews with victims and survivors of TFA, found a “considerable gap” in the understanding of TFA among frontline workers like police and victim service providers, with the result that police repeatedly dismissed TFA reports and failed to identify such incidents as examples of intimate partner violence. The study also identified a significant shortage of funding for specialists—that is, computer scientists skilled in conducting safety scans on the devices of people experiencing TFA. 

The dearth of understanding is particularly concerning because keeping up with the many faces of tech-facilitated abuse requires significant expertise and vigilance. As internet-connected cars and homes become more common and location tracking is increasingly normalized, novel opportunities are emerging to use technology to stalk and harass. In reporting this piece, I heard chilling tales of abusers who remotely locked partners in their own “smart homes,” sometimes turning up the heat for added torment. One woman who fled her abusive partner found an ominous message when she opened her Netflix account miles away: “Bitch I’m Watching You” spelled out where the names of the accounts’ users should be. 

Despite the range of tactics, a 2022 survey of TFA-focused studies across a number of English-speaking countries found that the results readily map onto the Power and Control Wheel, a tool developed in Duluth, Minnesota, in the 1980s that categorizes the all-encompassing ways abusive partners exert power and control over victims: economically, emotionally, through threats, using children, and more. Michaela Rogers, the lead author of the study and a senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield in the UK, says she noted “paranoia, anxiety, depression, trauma and PTSD, low self-esteem … and self-harm” among TFA survivors in the wake of abuse that often pervaded every aspect of their lives.

This kind of abuse is taxing and tricky to resolve alone. Service providers and victim advocates strive to help, but many lack tech skills, and they can’t stop tech companies from bringing products to market. Some work with those companies to help create safeguards, but there are limits to what businesses can do to hold abusive actors accountable. To establish real guardrails and dole out serious consequences, robust legal frameworks are needed. 

It’s been slow work, but there have been concerted efforts to address TFA at each of these levels in the past couple of years. Some US states have passed laws against using smart car technology or location trackers such as Apple AirTags for stalking and harassment. Tech companies, including Apple and Meta, have hired people with experience in victim services to guide development of product safeguards, and advocates for victims and survivors are seeking out more specialized tech education. 

But the ever-evolving nature of technology makes it nearly impossible to create a permanent fix. People I spoke with for this article described the effort as playing “whack-a-mole.” Just as you figure out how to alert people to smartphone location sharing, enter smart cars. Outlaw AirTag stalking and a newer, more effective tool appears that can legally track your ex. That’s why groups that uniquely address TFA, like the Clinic to End Tech Abuse (CETA) at Cornell Tech in New York City, are working to create permanent infrastructure. A problem that has typically been seen as a side focus for service organizations can finally get the treatment it deserves as a ubiquitous and potentially life-endangering aspect of intimate partner violence.  

Volunteer tech support

CETA saw its first client seven years ago. In a small white room on Cornell Tech’s Roosevelt Island campus, two computer scientists sat down with someone whose abuser had been accessing the photos on their iPhone. The person didn’t know how this was happening. 

“We worked with our client for about an hour and a half,” says one of the scientists, Thomas Ristenpart, “and realized it was probably an iCloud Family Sharing issue.”

At the time, CETA was one of just two clinics in the country created to address TFA (the other being the Technology Enabled Coercive Control Clinic in Seattle), and it remains on the cutting edge of the issue. 

Picture a Venn diagram, with one circle representing computer scientists and the other service providers for domestic violence victims. It’s practically two separate circles, with CETA occupying a thin overlapping slice. Tech experts are much more likely to be drawn to profitable companies or research institutions than social-work nonprofits, so it’s unexpected that a couple of academic researchers identified TFA as a problem and chose to dedicate their careers to combating it. Their work has won results, but the learning curve was steep. 

CETA grew out of an interest in measuring the “internet spyware software ecosystem” exploited in intimate partner violence, says Ristenpart. He and cofounder Nicola Dell initially figured they could help by building a tool that could scan phones for intrusive software. They quickly realized that this alone wouldn’t solve the problem—and could even compromise people’s safety if done carelessly, since it could alert abusers that their surveillance had been detected and was actively being thwarted.

ONUR BINAY/UNSPLASH

Instead, Dell and Ristenpart studied the dynamics of coercive control. They conducted about 14 focus groups with professionals who worked daily with victims and survivors. They connected with organizations like the Anti-Violence Project and New York’s Family Justice Centers to get referrals. With the covid-19 pandemic, CETA went virtual and stayed that way. Its services now resemble “remote tech support,” Dell says. A handful of volunteers, many of whom work in Big Tech, receive clients’ intake information and guide them through processes for stopping unwanted location sharing, for example, on their devices.

Remote support has sufficed because abusers generally aren’t carrying out the type of sophisticated attack that can be foiled only by disassembling a device. “For the most part, people are using standard tools in the way that they were designed to be used,” says Dell. For example, someone might throw an AirTag into a stroller to keep track of its whereabouts (and those of the person pushing it), or act as the admin of a shared online bank account. 

Though CETA stands out as a tech-­centric service organization for survivors, anti-domestic-violence groups have been encountering and combating TFA for decades. When Cindy Southworth started her career in the domestic violence field in the 1990s, she heard of abusers doing rough location tracking using car odometers—the mileage could suggest, for instance, that a driver pretending to set out for the supermarket had instead left town to seek support. Later, when Southworth joined the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the advocacy community was looking at caller ID as “not only an incredibly powerful tool for survivors to be able to see who’s calling,” she recalls, “but also potentially a risky technology, if an abuser could see.” 

As technology evolved, the ways abusers took advantage evolved too. Realizing that the advocacy community “was not up on tech,” Southworth founded the National Network to End Domestic Violence’s Safety Net Project in 2000 to provide a comprehensive training curriculum on how to “harness [technology] to help victims” and hold abusers accountable when they misuse it. Today, the project offers resources on its website, like tool kits that include guidance on strategies such as creating strong passwords and security questions. “When you’re in a relationship with someone,” explains director Audace Garnett, “they may know your mother’s maiden name.” 

Big Tech safeguards

Southworth’s efforts later extended to advising tech companies on how to protect users who have experienced intimate partner violence. In 2020, she joined Facebook (now Meta) as its head of women’s safety. “What really drew me to Facebook was the work on intimate image abuse,” she says, noting that the company had come up with one of the first “sextortion” policies in 2012. Now she works on “reactive hashing,” which adds “digital fingerprints” to images that have been identified as nonconsensual so that survivors only need to report them once for all repeats to get blocked.

Other areas of concern include “cyberflashing,” in which someone might share, say, unwanted explicit photos. Meta has worked to prevent that on Instagram by not allowing accounts to send images, videos, or voice notes unless they follow you. Besides that, though, many of Meta’s practices surrounding potential abuse appear to be more reactive than proactive. The company says it removes online threats that violate its policies against bullying and that promote “offline violence.” But earlier this year, Meta made its policies about speech on its platforms more permissive. Now users are allowed to refer to women as “household objects,” reported CNN, and to post transphobic and homophobic comments that had formerly been banned.

A key challenge is that the very same tech can be used for good or evil: A tracking function that’s dangerous for someone whose partner is using it to stalk them might help someone else stay abreast of a stalker’s whereabouts. When I asked sources what tech companies should be doing to mitigate technology-assisted abuse, researchers and lawyers alike tended to throw up their hands. One cited the problem of abusers using parental controls to monitor adults instead of children—tech companies won’t do away with those important features for keeping children safe, and there is only so much they can do to limit how customers use or misuse them. Safety Net’s Garnett said companies should design technology with safety in mind “from the get-go” but pointed out that in the case of many well-established products, it’s too late for that. A couple of computer scientists pointed to Apple as a company with especially effective security measures: Its closed ecosystem can block sneaky third-party apps and alert users when they’re being tracked. But these experts also acknowledged that none of these measures are foolproof. 

Over roughly the past decade, major US-based tech companies including Google, Meta, Airbnb, Apple, and Amazon have launched safety advisory boards to address this conundrum. The strategies they have implemented vary. At Uber, board members share feedback on “potential blind spots” and have influenced the development of customizable safety tools, says Liz Dank, who leads work on women’s and personal safety at the company. One result of this collaboration is Uber’s PIN verification feature, in which riders have to give drivers a unique number assigned by the app in order for the ride to start. This ensures that they’re getting into the right car. 

Apple’s approach has included detailed guidance in the form of a 140-page “Personal Safety User Guide.” Under one heading, “I want to escape or am considering leaving a relationship that doesn’t feel safe,” it provides links to pages about blocking and evidence collection and “safety steps that include unwanted tracking alerts.” 

Creative abusers can bypass these sorts of precautions. Recently Elizabeth (for privacy, we’re using her first name only) found an AirTag her ex had hidden inside a wheel well of her car, attached to a magnet and wrapped in duct tape. Months after the AirTag debuted, Apple had received enough reports about unwanted tracking to introduce a security measure letting users who’d been alerted that an AirTag was following them locate the device via sound. “That’s why he’d wrapped it in duct tape,” says Elizabeth. “To muffle the sound.”

Laws play catch-up

If tech companies can’t police TFA, law enforcement should—but its responses vary. “I’ve seen police say to a victim, ‘You shouldn’t have given him the picture,’” says Lisa Fontes, a psychologist and an expert on coercive control, about cases where intimate images are shared nonconsensually. When people have brought police hidden “nanny cams” planted by their abusers, Fontes has heard responses along the lines of “You can’t prove he bought it [or] that he was actually spying on you. So there’s nothing we can do.” 

Places like the Queens Family Justice Center in New York City aim to remedy these law enforcement challenges. Navigating its mazelike halls, you can’t avoid bumping into a mix of attorneys, social workers, and case managers—which I did when executive director Susan Jacob showed me around after my visit to CETA. That’s by design. The center, one of more than 100 throughout the US, provides multiple services for those affected by gender-based and domestic violence. As I left, I passed a police officer escorting a man in handcuffs.

CETA is in the process of moving its services here—and then to centers in the city’s other four boroughs. Having tech clinics at these centers will put the techies right next to lawyers who may be prosecuting cases. It’s tricky to prove the identity of people connected with anonymous forms of tech harassment like social media posts and spoofed phone calls, but the expert help could make it easier for lawyers to build cases for search warrants and protection orders.

Law enforcement’s responses to allegations of tech-facilitated abuse vary. “I’ve seen police say to a victim, ‘You shouldn’t have given him the picture.’”

Lisa Fontes, psychologist and expert on coercive control

Lawyers pursuing cases with tech components don’t always have the legal framework to back them up. But laws in most US states do prohibit remote, covert tracking and the nonconsensual sharing of intimate images, while laws relating to privacy invasion, computer crimes, and stalking might cover aspects of TFA. In December, Ohio passed a law making AirTag stalking a crime, and Florida is considering an amendment that would increase penalties for people who use tracking devices to “commit or facilitate commission of dangerous crimes.” But keeping up with evolving tech requires additional legal specificity. “Tech comes first,” explains Lindsey Song, associate program director of the Queens center’s family law project. “People use it well. Abusers figure out how to misuse it. The law and policy come way, way, way later.”

California is leading the charge in legislation addressing harassment via smart vehicles. Signed into law in September 2024, Senate Bill 1394 requires connected vehicles to notify users if someone has accessed their systems remotely and provide a way for drivers to stop that access. “Many lawmakers were shocked to learn how common this problem is,” says Akilah Weber Pierson, a state senator who coauthored the bill. “Once I explained how survivors were being stalked or controlled through features designed for convenience, there was a lot of support.”

At the federal level, the Safe Con­nections Act signed into law in 2022 requires mobile service providers to honor survivors’ requests to separate from abusers’ plans. As of 2024, the Federal Communications Commission has been examining how to incorporate smart-car-­facilitated abuse into the act’s purview. And in May, President Trump signed a bill prohibiting the online publication of sexually explicit images without consent. But there has been little progress on other fronts. The Tech Safety for Victims of Domestic Violence, Dating Violence, Sexual Assault, and Stalking Act would have authorized a pilot program, run by the Justice Department’s Office on Violence Against Women, to create as many as 15 TFA clinics for survivors. But since its introduction in the House of Representatives in November 2023, the bill has gone nowhere.

Tech abuse isn’t about tech

With changes happening so slowly at the legislative level, it remains largely up to folks on the ground to protect survivors from TFA. Rahul Chatterjee, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has taken a particularly hands-on approach. In 2021, he founded the Madison Tech Clinic after working at CETA as a graduate student. He and his team are working on a physical tool that can detect hidden cameras and other monitoring devices. The aim is to use cheap hardware like Raspberry Pis and ESP32s to keep it affordable.

Chatterjee has come across products online that purport to provide such protection, like radio frequency monitors for the impossibly low price of $20 and red-light devices claiming to detect invisible cameras. But they’re “snake oil,” he says. “We test them in the lab, and they don’t work.” 

With the Trump administration slashing academic funding, folks who run tech clinics have expressed concern about sustainability. Dell, at least, received $800,000 from the MacArthur Foundation in 2024, some of which she plans to put toward launching new CETA-like clinics. The tech clinic in Queens got some seed funding from CETA for its first year, but it is “actively seeking fundraising to continue the program,” says Jennifer Friedman, a lawyer with the nonprofit Sanctuary for Families, which is overseeing the clinic. 

While these clinics expose all sorts of malicious applications of technology, the moral of this story isn’t that you should fear your tech. It’s that people who aim to cause harm will take advantage of whatever new tools are available.

“[TFA] is not about the technology—it’s about the abuse,” says Garnett. “With or without the technology, the harm can still happen.” Ultimately, the only way to stem gender-based and intimate partner violence is at a societal level, through thoughtful legislation, amply funded antiviolence programs, and academic research that makes clinics like CETA possible.

In the meantime, to protect themselves, survivors like Gioia make do with Band-Aid fixes. She bought her kids separate smartphones and sports gear to use at her house so her ex couldn’t slip tracking devices into the equipment he’d provided. “I’m paying extra,” she says, “so stuff isn’t going back and forth.” She got a new number and a new phone. 

“Believe the people that [say this is happening to them],” she says, “because it’s going on, and it’s rampant.” 

Jessica Klein is a Philadelphia-based freelance journalist covering intimate partner violence, cryptocurrency, and other topics.

Tech billionaires are making a risky bet with humanity’s future

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” the famed computer scientist Alan Kay once said. Uttered more out of exasperation than as inspiration, his remark has nevertheless attained gospel-like status among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, in particular a handful of tech billionaires who fancy themselves the chief architects of humanity’s future. 

Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and others may have slightly different goals and ambitions in the near term, but their grand visions for the next decade and beyond are remarkably similar. Framed less as technological objectives and more as existential imperatives, they include aligning AI with the interests of humanity; creating an artificial superintelligence that will solve all the world’s most pressing problems; merging with that superintelligence to achieve immortality (or something close to it); establishing a permanent, self-­sustaining colony on Mars; and, ultimately, spreading out across the cosmos.

While there’s a sprawling patchwork of ideas and philosophies powering these visions, three features play a central role, says Adam Becker, a science writer and astrophysicist: an unshakable certainty that technology can solve any problem, a belief in the necessity of perpetual growth, and a quasi-religious obsession with transcending our physical and biological limits. In his timely new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, Becker calls this triumvirate of beliefs the “ideology of technological salvation” and warns that tech titans are using it to steer humanity in a dangerous direction. 

“In most of these isms you’ll find the idea of escape and transcendence, as well as the promise of an amazing future, full of unimaginable wonders—so long as we don’t get in the way of technological progress.”

“The credence that tech billionaires give to these specific science-fictional futures validates their pursuit of more—to portray the growth of their businesses as a moral imperative, to reduce the complex problems of the world to simple questions of technology, [and] to justify nearly any action they might want to take,” he writes. Becker argues that the only way to break free of these visions is to see them for what they are: a convenient excuse to continue destroying the environment, skirt regulations, amass more power and control, and dismiss the very real problems of today to focus on the imagined ones of tomorrow. 

A lot of critics, academics, and journalists have tried to define or distill the Silicon Valley ethos over the years. There was the “Californian Ideology” in the mid-’90s, the “Move fast and break things” era of the early 2000s, and more recently the “Libertarianism for me, feudalism for thee”  or “techno-­authoritarian” views. How do you see the “ideology of technological salvation” fitting in? 

I’d say it’s very much of a piece with those earlier attempts to describe the Silicon Valley mindset. I mean, you can draw a pretty straight line from Max More’s principles of transhumanism in the ’90s to the Californian Ideology [a mashup of countercultural, libertarian, and neoliberal values] and through to what I call the ideology of technological salvation. The fact is, many of the ideas that define or animate Silicon Valley thinking have never been much of a ­mystery—libertarianism, an antipathy toward the government and regulation, the boundless faith in technology, the obsession with optimization. 

What can be difficult is to parse where all these ideas come from and how they fit together—or if they fit together at all. I came up with the ideology of technological salvation as a way to name and give shape to a group of interrelated concepts and philosophies that can seem sprawling and ill-defined at first, but that actually sit at the center of a worldview shared by venture capitalists, executives, and other thought leaders in the tech industry. 

Readers will likely be familiar with the tech billionaires featured in your book and at least some of their ambitions. I’m guessing they’ll be less familiar with the various “isms” that you argue have influenced or guided their thinking. Effective altruism, rationalism, long­termism, extropianism, effective accelerationism, futurism, singularitarianism, ­transhumanism—there are a lot of them. Is there something that they all share? 

They’re definitely connected. In a sense, you could say they’re all versions or instantiations of the ideology of technological salvation, but there are also some very deep historical connections between the people in these groups and their aims and beliefs. The Extropians in the late ’80s believed in self-­transformation through technology and freedom from limitations of any kind—ideas that Ray Kurzweil eventually helped popularize and legitimize for a larger audience with the Singularity. 

In most of these isms you’ll find the idea of escape and transcendence, as well as the promise of an amazing future, full of unimaginable wonders—so long as we don’t get in the way of technological progress. I should say that AI researcher Timnit Gebru and philosopher Émile Torres have also done a lot of great work linking these ideologies to one another and showing how they all have ties to racism, misogyny, and eugenics.

You argue that the Singularity is the purest expression of the ideology of technological salvation. How so?

Well, for one thing, it’s just this very simple, straightforward idea—the Singularity is coming and will occur when we merge our brains with the cloud and expand our intelligence a millionfold. This will then deepen our awareness and consciousness and everything will be amazing. In many ways, it’s a fantastical vision of a perfect technological utopia. We’re all going to live as long as we want in an eternal paradise, watched over by machines of loving grace, and everything will just get exponentially better forever. The end.

The other isms I talk about in the book have a little more … heft isn’t the right word—they just have more stuff going on. There’s more to them, right? The rationalists and the effective altruists and the longtermists—they think that something like a singularity will happen, or could happen, but that there’s this really big danger between where we are now and that potential event. We have to address the fact that an all-powerful AI might destroy humanity—the so-called alignment problem—before any singularity can happen. 

Then you’ve got the effective accelerationists, who are more like Kurzweil, but they’ve got more of a tech-bro spin on things. They’ve taken some of the older transhumanist ideas from the Singularity and updated them for startup culture. Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” [from 2023] is a good example. You could argue that all of these other philosophies that have gained purchase in Silicon Valley are just twists on Kurzweil’s Singularity, each one building on top of the core ideas of transcendence, techno­-optimism, and exponential growth. 

Early on in the book you take aim at that idea of exponential growth—specifically, Kurzweil’s “Law of Accelerating Returns.” Could you explain what that is and why you think it’s flawed?

Kurzweil thinks there’s this immutable “Law of Accelerating Returns” at work in the affairs of the universe, especially when it comes to technology. It’s the idea that technological progress isn’t linear but exponential. Advancements in one technology fuel even more rapid advancements in the future, which in turn lead to greater complexity and greater technological power, and on and on. This is just a mistake. Kurzweil uses the Law of Accelerating Returns to explain why the Singularity is inevitable, but to be clear, he’s far from the only one who believes in this so-called law.

“I really believe that when you get as rich as some of these guys are, you can just do things that seem like thinking and no one is really going to correct you or tell you things you don’t want to hear.”

My sense is that it’s an idea that comes from staring at Moore’s Law for too long. Moore’s Law is of course the famous prediction that the number of transistors on a chip will double roughly every two years, with a minimal increase in cost. Now, that has in fact happened for the last 50 years or so, but not because of some fundamental law in the universe. It’s because the tech industry made a choice and some very sizable investments to make it happen. Moore’s Law was ultimately this really interesting observation or projection of a historical trend, but even Gordon Moore [who first articulated it] knew that it wouldn’t and couldn’t last forever. In fact, some think it’s already over. 

These ideologies take inspiration from some pretty unsavory characters. Transhumanism, you say, was first popularized by the eugenicist Julian Huxley in a speech in 1951. Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” name-checks the noted fascist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his futurist manifesto. Did you get the sense while researching the book that the tech titans who champion these ideas understand their dangerous origins?

You’re assuming in the framing of that question that there’s any rigorous thought going on here at all. As I say in the book, Andreessen’s manifesto runs almost entirely on vibes, not logic. I think someone may have told him about the futurist manifesto at some point, and he just sort of liked the general vibe, which is why he paraphrases a part of it. Maybe he learned something about Marinetti and forgot it. Maybe he didn’t care. 

I really believe that when you get as rich as some of these guys are, you can just do things that seem like thinking and no one is really going to correct you or tell you things you don’t want to hear. For many of these billionaires, the vibes of fascism, authoritarianism, and colonialism are attractive because they’re fundamentally about creating a fantasy of control. 

You argue that these visions of the future are being used to hasten environmental destruction, increase authoritarianism, and exacerbate inequalities. You also admit that they appeal to lots of people who aren’t billionaires. Why do you think that is? 

I think a lot of us are also attracted to these ideas for the same reasons the tech billionaires are—they offer this fantasy of knowing what the future holds, of transcending death, and a sense that someone or something out there is in control. It’s hard to overstate how comforting a simple, coherent narrative can be in an increasingly complex and fast-moving world. This is of course what religion offers for many of us, and I don’t think it’s an accident that a sizable number of people in the rationalist and effective altruist communities are actually ex-evangelicals.

More than any one specific technology, it seems like the most consequential thing these billionaires have invented is a sense of inevitability—that their visions for the future are somehow predestined. How does one fight against that?

It’s a difficult question. For me, the answer was to write this book. I guess I’d also say this: Silicon Valley enjoyed well over a decade with little to no pushback on anything. That’s definitely a big part of how we ended up in this mess. There was no regulation, very little critical coverage in the press, and a lot of self-mythologizing going on. Things have started to change, especially as the social and environmental damage that tech companies and industry leaders have helped facilitate has become more clear. That understanding is an essential part of deflating the power of these tech billionaires and breaking free of their visions. When we understand that these dreams of the future are actually nightmares for the rest of us, I think you’ll see that sense
of inevitability vanish pretty fast. 

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Bryan Gardiner is a writer based in Oakland, California. 

OpenAI: The power and the pride

In April, Paul Graham, the founder of the tech startup accelerator Y Combinator, sent a tweet in response to former YC president and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Altman had just bid a public goodbye to GPT-4 on X, and Graham had a follow-up question. 

“If you had [GPT-4’s model weights] etched on a piece of metal in the most compressed form,” Graham wrote, referring to the values that determine the model’s behavior, “how big would the piece of metal have to be? This is a mostly serious question. These models are history, and by default digital data evaporates.” 

There is no question that OpenAI pulled off something historic with its release of ChatGPT 3.5 in 2022. It set in motion an AI arms race that has already changed the world in a number of ways and seems poised to have an even greater long-term effect than the short-term disruptions to things like education and employment that we are already beginning to see. How that turns out for humanity is something we are still reckoning with and may be for quite some time. But a pair of recent books both attempt to get their arms around it with accounts of what two leading technology journalists saw at the OpenAI revolution. 

In Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, Karen Hao tells the story of the company’s rise to power and its far-reaching impact all over the world. Meanwhile, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future, by the Wall Street Journal’s Keach Hagey, homes in more on Altman’s personal life, from his childhood through the present day, in order to tell the story of OpenAI. Both paint complex pictures and show Altman in particular as a brilliantly effective yet deeply flawed creature of Silicon Valley—someone capable of always getting what he wants, but often by manipulating others. 

Hao, who was formerly a reporter with MIT Technology Review, began reporting on OpenAI while at this publication and remains an occasional contributor. One chapter of her book grew directly out of that reporting. And in fact, as Hao says in the acknowledgments of Empire of AI, some of her reporting for MIT Technology Review, a series on AI colonialism, “laid the groundwork for the thesis and, ultimately, the title of this book.” So you can take this as a kind of disclaimer that we are predisposed to look favorably on Hao’s work. 

With that said, Empire of AI is a powerful work, bristling not only with great reporting but also with big ideas. This comes across in service to two main themes. 

The first is simple: It is the story of ambition overriding ethics. The history of OpenAI as Hao tells it (and as Hagey does too) is very much a tale of a company that was founded on the idealistic desire to create a safety-focused artificial general intelligence but instead became more interested in winning. This is a story we’ve seen many times before in Big Tech. See Theranos, which was going to make diagnostics easier, or Uber, which was founded to break the cartel of “Big Taxi.” But the closest analogue might be Google, which went from “Don’t be evil” to (at least in the eyes of the courts) illegal monopolist. For that matter, consider how Google went from holding off on releasing its language model as a consumer product out of an abundance of caution to rushing a chatbot out the door to catch up with and beat OpenAI. In Silicon Valley, no matter what one’s original intent, it always comes back to winning.  

The second theme is more complex and forms the book’s thesis about what Hao calls AI colonialism. The idea is that the large AI companies act like traditional empires, siphoning wealth from the bottom rungs of society in the forms of labor, creative works, raw materials, and the like to fuel their ambition and enrich those at the top of the ladder. “I’ve found only one metaphor that encapsulates the nature of what these AI power players are: empires,” she writes.

“During the long era of European colonialism, empires seized and extracted resources that were not their own and exploited the labor of the people they subjugated to mine, cultivate, and refine those resources for the empires’ enrichment.” She goes on to chronicle her own growing disillusionment with the industry. “With increasing clarity,” she writes, “I realized that the very revolution promising to bring a better future was instead, for people on the margins of society, reviving the darkest remnants of the past.” 

To document this, Hao steps away from her desk and goes out into the world to see the effects of this empire as it sprawls across the planet. She travels to Colombia to meet with data labelers tasked with teaching AI what various images show, one of whom she describes sprinting back to her apartment for the chance to make a few dollars. She documents how workers in Kenya who performed data-labeling content moderation for OpenAI came away traumatized by seeing so much disturbing material. In Chile she documents how the industry extracts precious resources—water, power, copper, lithium—to build out data centers. 

She lands on the ways people are pushing back against the empire of AI across the world. Hao draws lessons from New Zealand, where Maori people are attempting to save their language using a small language model of their own making. Trained on volunteers’ voice recordings and running on just two graphics processing units, or GPUs, rather than the thousands employed by the likes of OpenAI, it’s meant to benefit the community, not exploit it. 

Hao writes that she is not against AI. Rather: “What I reject is the dangerous notion that broad benefit from AI can only be derived from—indeed will ever emerge from—a vision of the technology that requires the complete capitulation of our privacy, our agency, and our worth, including the value of our labor and art, toward an ultimately imperial centralization project … [The New Zealand model] shows us another way. It imagines how AI could be exactly the opposite. Models can be small and task-specific, their training data contained and knowable, ridding the incentives for widespread exploitative and psychologically harmful labor practices and the all-consuming extractivism of producing and running massive supercomputers.” 

Hagey’s book is more squarely focused on Altman’s ambition, which she traces back to his childhood. Yet interestingly, she also  zeroes in on the OpenAI CEO’s attempt to create an empire. Indeed, “Altman’s departure from YC had not slowed his civilization-building ambitions,” Hagey writes. She goes on to chronicle how Altman, who had previously mulled a run for governor of California, set up experiments with income distribution via Tools for Humanity, the parent company of Worldcoin. She quotes Altman saying of it, “I thought it would be interesting to see … just how far technology could accomplish some of the goals that used to be done by nation-states.” 

Overall, The Optimist is the more straightforward business biography of the two. Hagey has packed it full with scoops and insights and behind-the-scenes intrigue. It is immensely readable as a result, especially in the second half, when OpenAI really takes over the story. Hagey also seems to have been given far more access to Altman and his inner circles, personal and professional, than Hao did, and that allows for a fuller telling of the CEO’s story in places. For example, both writers cover the tragic story of Altman’s sister Annie, her estrangement from the family, and her accusations in particular about suffering sexual abuse at the hands of Sam (something he and the rest of the Altman family vehemently deny). Hagey’s telling provides a more nuanced picture of the situation, with more insight into family dynamics. 

Hagey concludes by describing Altman’s reckoning with his role in the long arc of human history and what it will mean to create a “superintelligence.” His place in that sweep is something that clearly has consumed the CEO’s thoughts. When Paul Graham asked about preserving GPT-4, for example, Altman had a response at the ready. He replied that the company had already considered this, and that the sheet of metal would need to be 100 meters square.

Why Chinese manufacturers are going viral on TikTok

Since the video was posted earlier this month, millions of TikTok users have watched as a young Chinese man in a blue T-shirt sits beside a traditional tea set and speaks directly to the camera in accented English: “Let’s expose luxury’s biggest secret.” 

He stands and lifts what looks like an Hermès Birkin bag, one of the world’s most exclusive and expensive handbags, before gesturing toward the shelves filled with more bags behind him. “You recognize them: Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci—all crafted in our workshops.”

♬ original sound – DHgate

Video “exposés” like this—where a sales agent breaks down the material cost of luxury goods, from handbags to perfumes to appliances—are everywhere on TikTok right now. 

Some videos claim, for example, that a pair of Lululemon leggings costs just $4 to make. Others show the scale and precision of Chinese manufacturing: Creators walk through spotless factory floors, passing automated assembly lines and teams of workers at clean, orderly stations. Some factories identify themselves as suppliers—or former suppliers—for brands like Dyson, Under Armour, and Victoria’s Secret.

Whether or not their claims are true, these videos and their virality speak to a new, serious push by Chinese manufacturers to connect directly with American consumers. Even with tariffs, many of the products pitched in the videos would still be significantly cheaper than buying from the name brands. (MIT Technology Review did not verify the claims made in the videos about where products are produced and how much the manufacturing costs; Lululemon, Hermès, Kering (the owner of Gucci), and LVMH (the owner of Louis Vuitton) did not reply to requests for comment.)

Fueled by fears of losing international business and frustration over Trump-era tariffs, factories are turning their production lines into content studios to market themselves—filming leather workshops and sewing lines, offering warehouse tours. What began as the work of a few frustrated sourcing agents has morphed into a full-blown genre that’s part protest, part marketing plan, part survival strategy.

It’s “a collective search for a workaround” to the tariffs, says Ivy Yang, an e-commerce expert and founder of the New York–based consulting firm Wavelet Strategy. “Smaller platforms and sourcing agents are jumping in, offering ‘direct from factory’ content on social media as an alternative supply route.”

Cutting out the middleman

The Chinese creators sharing insights into sourcing materials and manufacturing techniques often offer direct purchasing options that effectively bypass traditional retail channels. 

The companies that sell directly to consumers include DHgate, a Chinese B2B e-commerce platform, which users commonly refer to as “the gate” or “the yellow app.” In the US Apple app store, the app jumped from #302 on April 8 to #2 overall in mid-April, just behind ChatGPT. On April 15, it was the most downloaded app in the country. As of April 18, DHgate sat at the top of Apple’s shopping charts in 98 countries. 

After buying on DHgate, users enthusiastically return to TikTok to share their new purchases; one user jokingly bragged, “Ordered my bag from my Chinese plug.”

DHGate told MIT Technology Review that the social media attention has resulted in a surge in transactions on the platform, with categories like home goods, electronics, outdoor gear, and pet supplies seeing the most popularity. During the week of April 12 to 19, home appliances saw a 962% increase in sales, while security tech jumped 601%.

TikTok is indeed not a vanity project for these manufacturers but a survival strategy in an increasingly competitive environment. 

Chinese factories have long sold to overseas markets, but when domestic economic growth started to slow in the past decade, manufacturers increasingly turned to major B2B platforms like Alibaba to connect with buyers abroad without relying on middlemen. In the past few years, however, the cost of gaining visibility to foreign buyers on major platforms like Amazon and Alibaba has skyrocketed. 

“It has become a crowded, saturated space, and it could cost 30,000 to 40,000 RMB [$210,000 to $290,000] a year just to get your factory to show up on the first page in search results,” says Logan Wang, an e-commerce manager at Shendeng Consulting, who advises Chinese manufacturers on overseas operations.

The landscape only got more fraught as traditional manufacturing sectors struggled with oversupply and post-covid stagnation. In 2024, China’s apparel exports to the US grew by less than 1%, while the average unit price of those goods dropped by 7.6%—a sign that competition is fiercer and profit margins are shrinking. 

Add the new tariffs to this mix and Chinese manufacturers are increasingly motivated to find creative ways to reach buyers.

Linda Luo, a manager at a Guangzhou-based apparel factory, says that in the wake of the latest round of sanctions, her factory has paused US shipments, which previously accounted for around 30% of their sales. Now, storage rooms are filling up with products that have no clear destination. 

“Many nearby factories are like us,” Luo says, “holding out to see how these tariffs develop, hoping the situation will resolve itself.” Motivated by the success of peers who’ve gone viral, Luo says, her team is now actively reaching out to TikTok-famous sourcing agents, hoping to forge direct connections with new buyers.

But it’s not just economic conditions pushing the viral videos; there’s also a feeling that Chinese work and craftsmanship are being disrespected. In a Fox News interview on April 3, for instance, Vice President JD Vance made a comment denigrating the “Chinese peasants” who make products for Americans. The remark drew sharp criticism from Chinese officials and from Chinese people across the internet, who viewed it as insulting. 

“Chinese manufacturers have done the dirtiest, most arduous work for Western brands since the 1980s—often with razor-thin margins,” says Wang. “And yet they’re constantly stigmatized, pushed around, and caught in the crossfire of geopolitics. Hearing President Trump frame the past few decades as China taking advantage of the US—that’s a narrative that doesn’t sit right with anyone working in this industry.”

Factory as spectacle

Beyond rage and anxiety, Chinese factories have been inspired by the past viral success of manufacturing content on TikTok, according to Tianyu Fang, a technology and democracy fellow at the think tank New America who studies Chinese technology and globalization. Since 2020, factory videos showing assembly lines producing everyday items like wigs, dolls, and gloves have amassed millions of views. In comments, viewers describe these looping production videos as “soothing” and “mesmerizing.” 

By 2022, factories themselves recognized their work floors as content gold mines. But Alice Gu, who works at a Shenzhen-based digital marketing company and helps factories build their TikTok presence, has seen client inquiries triple over the past year, with many now featuring English-speaking staff as on-camera personalities.

As Fang explains, “These videos resonate with young people in the West on TikTok because manufacturing is so removed from their daily experience. They offer rare glimpses into advanced manufacturing while satisfying genuine curiosity.”

He adds: “Seeing Chinese factory workers address Western audiences directly feels almost subversive.”

The cultural gap between creators and audiences has become an asset rather than a liability, generating authentic moments that resonate with users who are hyper-online. 

One creator, Tony, toggles between American accents while promoting light boxes; he has gained over 1.2 million Instagram followers as the face of LC Sign, a Guangzhou electrical signage company. The “alumununu lady,” a saleswoman with a distinctive accent promoting capsule homes by Etong, turned “Hello, boss” into a catchphrase adopted by countless factory videos. In 2024, Dong Hua Jin Long, an industrial glycine manufacturer, went viral for machine-translated promotional videos boasting unmatched production quality. TikTok users found humor in the niche company’s efforts to connect with potential customers, making it a widely circulated meme.

“These videos appeal largely because they’re so wonderfully out of context,” Fang says. “The popularity of these sourcing videos reflects a desire to understand previously hidden parts of the global economy and find alternatives to mainstream political narratives.”

Despite the trend, experts including Yang and Fang don’t believe large numbers of average American consumers will shift to buying directly from factories, as the process involves too many logistical hurdles. There’s also been plenty of news coverage warning that you may not end up getting an all-but-equal-to-Hermès bag without the brand label. 

Yaling Jiang, writer of the newsletter Following the Yuan, explains that buying through factory back channels is a common practice in China: “It’s an open secret that many local factories produce for prestigious brands, and people often buy through side channels to get similar-quality products at a fraction of the price.” However, Jiang suggests that these arrangements rely on a complex supply and distribution system—and warns that some TikTok sourcing agents may be falsely claiming connections to well-known companies.

On top of all this, these direct-to-consumer videos may not even be available much longer. Yang warns that a lot of the content treads dangerously close to copyright infringement. “This will quickly become an IP minefield for platforms like TikTok and Instagram,” she says. “If the trend continues to grow, rights holders will push back—and platform governance will need to catch up fast.”

MIT Technology Review found that many of the original viral videos promoting knockoff products have already been removed from TikTok. DHgate did not respond to a request for comment regarding whether it facilitates the sale of counterfeit products.

Nevertheless, many Chinese factories will almost certainly continue to build out their own R&D teams—and not just to weather the current moment. “Every factory owner’s dream is to have their own brand,” Wang says. “After decades of making products designed elsewhere, Chinese manufacturers are ready to create, not just produce.”