The Technostines Are Coming:AI doomers, digital philistines, and the future that refuses to ask permission

20 May

The Two Tribes of Technological Panic

Every civilisation believes it will recognise the future before it arrives. None ever do.

Instead, technological emergence tends to produce two predictable tribes. The first are the doomers, prophets who are convinced the machine will destroy civilisation. The second are what I’ve started calling the technostines.

The word is a small act of mischief. A philistine, in the old cultural insult, is someone hostile or indifferent to art, beauty, and higher culture. A technostine is its modern cousin: someone hostile or indifferent to technological emergence. Not because the technology is inherently bad, but because it violates their sense of how culture is meant to work.

The doomer fears the future.

The technostine resents it.

Both misunderstand emergence.

What Emergence Actually Means

Emergence is what happens when simple parts interact and produce a larger pattern that none of the parts individually intended.

A single bird does not design a murmuration. A single ant does not understand the colony. A single neuron does not contain consciousness. Yet from these interactions, new forms appear.

Technology behaves similarly once released into human civilisation. A tool enters the world. People use it for practical reasons. Markets form around it. Status systems adapt. Laws chase after it. Moral panic follows. Then, quietly, a new layer of civilisation appears.

This is why technological prediction fails so often. We predict the tool. We miss the ecosystem.

The Long History of Missing the Point

When the motor car arrived, people did not merely get a faster horse. They got suburbs, commuting, petrol stations, road trauma, fast food, teenage independence, oil geopolitics, and the weekend drive.

When the printing press arrived, Europe did not merely get cheaper books. It got mass literacy, religious upheaval, scientific networks, propaganda, public opinion, and the slow collapse of priestly control over knowledge.

When the internet arrived, we imagined a global library. We got that, briefly. Then we also got influencers, dating apps, conspiracy economies, algorithmic tribes, meme warfare, parasocial celebrities, remote work, and teenagers filming themselves for invisible audiences.

When smartphones arrived, we thought we were getting portable phones. We got permanent maps, cameras, wallets, diaries, televisions, confession booths, surveillance devices, status machines, and attention traps sitting in everyone’s pocket.

The pattern is always the same. Humans recognise the invention and misread the emergence.

AI is now entering the same phase.

The Doomers and the Seduction of Apocalypse

The AI doomers are already familiar. They populate podcasts, think pieces, panels, and private lunches with increasingly cinematic warnings. Artificial superintelligence. Human extinction. Autonomous deception. Digital gods.

Some of their concerns are legitimate. Powerful systems create powerful risks. Only a fool would dismiss the dangers of synthetic persuasion, automated cyberattack, institutional dependency, military AI, or machine-generated misinformation.

But doom also performs a psychological function. It grants significance.

To predict apocalypse is to become important. The prophet does not merely comment on events. He stands above history, pointing at the approaching fire.

Medieval societies had Revelation. Technological societies have AGI timelines.

Silicon Valley has reinvented secular end-times theology using GPUs.

The Technostines and the Defence of Scarcity

The technostines are more interesting.

Unlike ordinary sceptics, technostines are not merely cautious about technology. They are aesthetically offended by it. Their disgust arrives before their argument.

AI art is “soulless.”

AI writing is “fake.”

AI music is “cheating.”

AI cognition is “not real intelligence.”

Sometimes they are right. Much AI output is shallow, derivative, synthetic, and mediocre. But the emotional intensity of the reaction often exceeds the quality problem. Something deeper is being threatened.

Scarcity.

Every civilisation attaches prestige to capacities that are difficult to access. Literacy once signalled elite status. Photography once required specialised equipment and skill. Publishing required editors, printers, distributors, and institutional permission. Serious knowledge lived behind universities, journals, libraries, and professional guilds.

Then each barrier weakened.

The printing press democratised text. Cameras democratised images. The internet democratised publishing. Smartphones democratised broadcasting.

Now AI is democratising competent cognition.

This is why the reaction is so sharp. AI is not merely producing bad poems and strange hands. It is destabilising prestige hierarchies. If ordinary people can suddenly produce decent illustrations, essays, music, code, business plans, legal drafts, therapy scripts, lesson plans, and strategic summaries, then whole status systems begin to reorganise.

The technostine imagines they are defending culture.

Often, they are defending scarcity.

Effort Is Not the Same as Value

One of the technostine’s favourite moves is to confuse effort with virtue.

Real art must be hard. Real writing must be slow. Real knowledge must be earned through suffering. Real expertise must pass through the old institutions.

But civilisation has never preserved difficulty simply because difficulty was difficult.

We replaced scribes with printing presses. We replaced horses with engines. We replaced mental arithmetic with calculators. We replaced memory with search. In each case, something was lost. In each case, something else expanded.

Civilisation consistently trades purity for scale.

This does not mean every trade is wise. It means the trade happens anyway when the incentive is strong enough.

Emergent Ignorance

This is the central mistake made by both doomers and technostines. They imagine emergence as a conscious decision.

It rarely is.

Societies do not adopt technologies because they are morally pure. They adopt them because they are useful, profitable, addictive, strategically necessary, or status enhancing. Once embedded, civilisation reorganises around the new capability.

I call this emergent ignorance: the inability of intelligent agents inside a complex adaptive system to perceive the next layer of organisation until it has already formed around them.

We did not understand social media while building it. We still barely understand it now.

AI will likely follow the same trajectory. Not as one dramatic moment where machines “wake up,” but as a slow diffusion into cognition itself. Education, medicine, friendship, creativity, bureaucracy, loneliness, romance, governance, entertainment, memory, and identity will increasingly become machine-mediated.

AI may become less like a tool and more like infrastructural cognition, a distributed layer of outsourced thought wrapped around civilisation.

The Future Does Not Ask Permission

This may become dangerous. It may become magnificent. It may become banal. More likely, it will become all three at once.

The real future rarely looks like science fiction. Civilisations do not usually explode on schedule. They reorganise quietly, then wake up inside behavioural systems they no longer fully understand.

The doomers think intelligence ends civilisation.

The technostines think civilisation can refuse intelligence.