You Can’t Tech Away Loneliness
They will try to fix the unfixable and manage to break the unbreakable
7 min readOct 24, 2024
Social problems require social solutions.
That’s the most conventional take — bordering on platitude — against attempts from technology to solve social problems. It’s true, though not because innovation is inherently at odds with the social-ness of things. The reason is — as it always is — Moloch. We’ll get to that later.
Technologists insist anyway — sometimes dressed up with good intentions, sometimes dressed up in green — but can’t move the needle. In a sense, the repeated failure of tech-bro approaches to figure out society as if it were a business plan compels me to agree with the standard take, so let’s use it as a starting point: Social problems require social solutions.
It invites a few questions.
- Why do would-be tech founders keep trying to mitigate these collective issues (that, ironically, often emerged out of other tech)?
- Why does society at large remain unable to coordinate so we don’t need or encourage those emphatically proposed but inevitably doomed entrepreneurial dabs?
- Are the lives of the people affected better off with tech non-solutions or with unsolved pains?
