The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born

14 May 2026 – Baldur Bjarnason

When I was living in the UK, one of the more common responses people had to me being Icelandic – beyond the strangely common “I hate Björk” refrain – was some comment about Vikings or Norse mythology. I’m guessing my name helped prompt those. We all have very traditional Icelandic names in my family. If the comment caught me at the wrong time, I’d occasionally reply in my usual literal-minded way: The Vikings were coastal raiders and Iceland is an island in the middle of bloody nowhere. Once Iceland was settled in 930, we were mostly a nation of farmers and substantially Celtic. We were probably the least ‘Viking’ of all the Nordic countries. Besides, we converted to Christianity in the year 1000, so we were only pagan for a few decades at most. The Icelandic Sagas are a bit like cowboy movies in that they’re the events of a few short years spun into a nation-building mythology that’s well out of proportion to their historical impact. The idea of us being a “Viking nation” has a strong hold on people’s imagination. But we’ve been a Christian culture for a thousand years. Longer if you account for the few settlers like my ancestor Auður Djúpúðga who were Christian a century before the rest of the nation converted. One of the pitfalls of growing up in a Christian culture, one that sticks with you even when, like me, you’ve been an atheist most of your life, is a tendency towards knee-jerk millenarianist thinking. “This changes everything!” No matter the flavour of Christianity, a core idea baked into every aspect of the religion is that singular revelatory events can fundamentally change the world. There’s the “before”. Then the “event”. Then an “after” that has been completely transformed. In Christianity itself this is usually associated with Christ’s chaotic transit schedule – “He is here! He has left! He is about to arrive again! Now he’s leaving again! But he’s also somehow always been here! And not.” – but the mode of thinking is common throughout literature, philosophy, and storytelling in the Christian west. When we tell our stories and spout our opinions, we are very prone to statements along the lines of “this changes everything!”.

However, when you study comparative literature you quickly discover that cultures dominated by other religions tend not to have this tendency, at least not to the same extent. This colours academic thinking as well. Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shift, for example, on the face of it frames scientific progress as a series of singular revelatory events that each change an entire field of study in almost one go. But if you dig into the text itself, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the process it describes is one where the worldviews of scientists and academics change one by one, where many simply never adopt the new worldview – the one that more cohesively explains what they’ve been observing – and instead stick to preexisting models. Even the most sudden and dramatic paradigm shifts are processes of epistemic diffusion where the old and new models of truth coexist and interact. All of which is to say that Kuhn’s ideas lend themselves to a pluralistic interpretation provided you actually dig into the text itself, and it means that, if you squint, you could make the ideas work with theories of epistemic anarchism such as that of Paul Feyerabend. Kuhn’s paradigm shift is less a revelation and more a cycle where the new contains elements of the old and the old attains elements of the new. From an individual perspective, switching your worldview or mental model on a problem or topic can feel revelatory. “This changes everything!” But the world hasn’t changed. All that changed is how you understand it. I say all this because I don’t want people to fall into the pitfall of expecting revolution. But I do want you to be open to the idea that events can change, transform even, our understanding of how things work. There have been a few moments in my life where singular events changed my worldview without truly changing any of the facts I knew. They simply triggered a new thought: “Oh, this explains what’s been happening.” The simultaneous realisation that the core argument of my PhD thesis was simply incorrect but that it would also pass easily because I knew the people who were likely to judge it – the theory would play to their biases. I had the choice of continuing to work on what was incorrect and get a PhD or to deliver what I believed to be true and almost certainly not finish the PhD. I still don’t know if I made the right choice.

I’m certainly not proud of it. Walking through the ASDA superstore in Bristol and seeing it for the monument to destruction that it is. Civilisation-scale existential decay as aisles and aisles of branded consumer goods. Sitting in on a talk on autism diagnoses, one of a series of scientific talks, watching an animation they used as a diagnostic aid, hearing everybody around me laugh as if the shapes on the screen made sense, only then truly understanding myself, and feeling more alone than I have ever felt before or since. Nothing changed in these moments but in personal terms there was a “before”, the moment, followed by the “after” where everything had changed. The world was the same. But to me the world had transformed. The US techopolistic hegemony # Reading that Dmitry Sklyarov had been arrested for violating the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act was the moment I first truly understood how the technopoly of the US government and the tech industry worked. There have been many definitions of Neil Postman’s term technopoly but mine is: In a technopoly, the only ideas and thoughts that have social and cultural legitimacy are those that support, are supported by, and are mediated through technology. New ideas in education or healthcare, for example, are evaluated through a technological lens and not whether they educate or heal. The Sklyarov case was notable for a few reasons:

He and ElcomSoft had been working within the preexisting paradigm where ideas were evaluated based on their quality and how well they stood up to discourse. Adobe had shipped ebook DRM software that was flawed as designed and trivially breakable. Exposing these failures was a legitimate research activity. But ideas in a technopoly aren’t evaluated based on how well they work but in terms of how well they support technology as a culture. That the systems were crap didn’t matter: they were sacrosanct. A technopoly is both cultural and political because “technology” is both a culture and a self-reinforcing socioeconomic system. Looking at the world through the lens of “technology” leads you to think about the world in terms of technology. Once you accept it as a frame of reference it becomes all-encompassing. By defending the technopoly the US government was signalling to its allies that, as a political and cultural paradigm, the technological mode of thought was not optional.

They clearly saw this worldview as integral to the future of the US hegemony.

Despite Adobe withdrawing its complaint, the US persisted in pursuing the case because the point it was making was larger than a single company. That the case ended in acquittal was neither here nor there – although it admittedly mattered to the defendants. What mattered to the rest of us was that it wasn’t enough for the United States that they effectively controlled tech and copyright policy worldwide – most of its allies had followed its example and implemented or were in the process of implementing their own version of the DMCA – they demanded that thought, debate, and meaning conformed as well. The economics and ideology of Technology were – always – intertwined. Global tech policy and discourse was set and enforced by the US to favour US-based tech companies whether the companies involved wanted it or not. The global tech economy # Our current globalised tech industry can only exist because of the protectionism and policy uniformity imposed by the United States on its hegemony. That billions of people across dozens of countries work and interact on unified platforms whose laws and regulations are, for all practical purposes, basically that of the US – the policies of end-user nations tend to have a minimal effect on how any of these platforms are run – is an artifact of US dominance. It’s not because these companies are so fantastic or that their products are so amazing that countries would face local uprisings if they tried to keep them in check. They are, more often than not, about as popular and respected as tobacco or pharmaceutical companies – some of them and their products are polling in terms of public sentiment in ranges similar to child molesters or authoritarian immigration enforcement entities – and their CEOs are some of the more despised public figures in recent history. Countries can fine the tech industry, up to a point, as that just establishes the cost of doing business. “This is the price list for inflicting societal suffering. Pick the one that suits your business model.” But attempts to genuinely change the rules – beyond just enforcing bullshit compliance regulations that mostly serve to keep local upstart competitors in check – will be blocked, overtly or covertly, by the United States. Before, when the US system of free-flowing trade was still in full force, much of the pressure was implicit or covert. US diplomats didn’t need to say anything.

All that was needed was a tacit understanding that there were rules, that the US set those rules, and that those who followed the rules would benefit from the trade that came with being a part of the global hegemony. The rules didn’t need to be enforced directly except in extreme cases. Even legislation such as the EU’s GDPR exists mostly to strengthen the existing system by establishing rules and boundaries that only incumbent – mostly US – tech companies have the resources to fully follow, and the system was packed with enough exceptions and loopholes to ensure that when it came to changing corporate behaviour it was more theatre than action. Regulation that’s defined entirely in terms of the technology it regulates, as opposed to in terms of the effects it has on society or imposing boundaries and limits on the technology itself, is a core component of the technopolistic political and legislative environment. The game of technology is defined and controlled by the United States of America. Local governments can impose rules that moderate the impact, but genuine limitations on technology are impossible. Or, they used to be. The decline # In parallel with the rise of the technopoly over the past couple of decades the US’s global dominance has been declining. The 2007 crash effectively legalising financial fraud – you only get jail time if you defraud the rich – lead to both a decline in the rule of law in the US and an excessively financialised economy. When stock markets and the like are overrepresented they suck the air out of the rest of the economy and make it less competitive. If you have two economies of equal size and productivity, one has a massive financial sector and billionaires while the other does not, the financialised economy will have less left over to invest in research, education, infrastructure, and healthcare. Over time, it will inevitably fall behind the country with a smaller financial sector because it’s the other things that drive the economy and productivity, not stock market growth. The US has coasted on the fact that it’s economy is so big that it could afford all the finance and billionaire parasites sucking its blood. At least for a while. The other force driving the decline is China. The rise of China and the decline of the rule of law governing finance in the US has added tension to the relationships in the western hegemony.