Book

The Technological Grotesque

Modern societies have become extraordinarily sophisticated at building technologies—and progressively less capable of asking what those technologies are for, whom they serve, and what kinds of societies they produce.

The Technological Grotesque argues that this is not simply a problem of AI or Silicon Valley. It is a deeper transformation in how technological societies understand knowledge, responsibility, and human judgment.

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The Central Paradox

The book traces how technical expertise became increasingly separated from humanistic reasoning, democratic deliberation, and moral inquiry. As engineering and optimization came to be treated as objective and authoritative, questions of value were increasingly displaced rather than resolved.

Silicon Valley became the most influential expression of this worldview. Technologies optimized for engagement, efficiency, and scale came to be understood as inherently socially beneficial, even as they reorganized democracy, labor, education, and public life around commercial incentives.

The result is what I call the technological grotesque: systems that promise connection while generating alienation; technologies marketed as democratizing while concentrating power; infrastructures presented as empowering while diminishing human agency.

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What This Book Argues

The greatest risks created by AI are not merely technical failures. They emerge when societies lose the institutional capacity to ask normative questions about the technologies they build. The organizations created to repair those failures increasingly reproduce the same fragmentation that caused them in the first place.

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Why This Matters

In response to the harms of technological production, organizations built ethics teams, Responsible AI groups, Trust & Safety organizations, and AI governance functions.

Yet these efforts often reproduce the very fragmentation they were created to overcome.

My research asks why.