I'm not a techno-pessimist. In fact, I'm often the only one arguing against philosophical pessimism, which is not the belief that bad things will happen—of course they will—but a sort of low-carb nihilism that sees calamity around every corner. It's completely unfalsifiable, by the way. Because calamities do in fact happen, the pessimist is never wrong if he waits long enough.
But as grumpy as they are, the pessimists are not nearly as annoying as their counterparts, who are not content to grumble in a corner. Techno-optimists in particular are only truly happy when converting everyone to their religion.
Have you heard the good news???
Optimists have now argued that blockchain is going to fix voting, welfare, the news, taxation, the environment (that's funny), and social media, which is using one utopian tool to fix the last one, that broke. Snakeoil, it seems, will even cure snakeoil sickness.
To be clear, I know almost nothing about blockchain. But I've seen this show enough to have figured out the plot. Whether it's the PC, which was supposed to spare us from drudgery, or the internet, which was supposed to make a recession-proof economy, or social media, which was supposed to unite the world, or AI, which was supposed to actually be intelligent, the techno-optimists' claims have not just regularly fallen short, they have consistently done so.
The truth is, you don't have to understand blockchain technology to understand that it's technology, which means it's a tool, and tools are now as they've always been: only as good or as bad as the humans that wield them. For techno-optimism to be anything other than salesmanship for another get-rich-quick scheme, the technology on offer must actually be ennobling in some way. In other words, using it has to literally make you a better person. Whatever blockchain does, it doesn't do that, which shows you just how much blockchain, and techno-optimism generally, is more cult than anything. They've simply replaced ritual and a secret handshake with a different kind of magical code.
We grow up in a society that preaches anything newer or faster is automatically better. For a long time, perhaps even still, technologists believed that part of the reason computers weren't intelligent was that they just weren't fast enough, and if we kept making them faster, they would reach some magical threshold and start composing hip hop.
But faster thinking isn't better thinking. If a thinking machine makes defects in two out of every three outputs, running it faster is only going to increase the number of defects per minute, which is arguably worse. (For the record, slower thinking isn't necessarily better, although it can be if the extra time is used for error correction.)
Positive changes to society don't require advanced technology. One of the most positive—arguably the most beneficial in the last 500 years—is public sanitation, and there's nothing high-tech about it. The ancient Romans and Chinese both had versions.
Blockchain relies on it, in fact. Almost everything today does. In as much as the industrial revolution required huge local labor pools—i.e. large cities—it brought unprecedented numbers of people in close contact and then linked them all through trade. Without public sanitation, the industrial world would've collapsed spectacularly. (It's certainly tried regardless.)
After our piece on how we don't live in a cyberpunk dystopia, we were told everyone must either be an optimist or a pessimist, that it's inescapable. That is an error of perception. We each occupy a single point on a hypothetical continuum. Since no one will match our views exactly, they will all appear to look either more or less favorably on change. Everyone to the right is optimistic and everyone to the left is pessimistic, leaving you the one reasonable center of everything.
Sometimes there are reasons to be optimistic. Sometimes there are reasons to be pessimistic. There is no mythical balanced point on the continuum because there is no continuum. If you're looking to cultivate a balanced view—on anything, not just technology—consider the Chinese parable of the farmer, or Kurt Vonnegut's lecture on the shape of stories, which might seem to have nothing to do with each other…