Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: What Does Technology Say About Us All?

Technology is blamed for lots of things - destroying our mental health, facilitating crime, dividing our nation, causing the obesity crisis, allowing adversaries to access information, ruining relationships, tanking traditional industries, and the list goes on and on.

I like blaming technology for lots of things.

I work in tech, so I get paid to fix things billed as tech problems.

But the reality is, it’s easier to accuse a soulless software program of all our societal problems than it is to actually look under the hood and figure out what’s really going on. Tech, social media, smartphones, the Internet…pointing our collective failing fingers at the 1s and 0s behind the screens we’re so obsessed with absolves us from having to take responsibility for many things.

Reflections We Don’t Want to See

While it’s true that technology plays a part in disseminating many of the societal ills from which we suffer, it’s not really the root cause worthy of all blame. If we actually wanted to actually “fix” the problems that plague humanity, we would have to look well beyond the siloed virtual worlds so intentionally disconnected from our physical communities and address what’s really going on under the surface. Are we all a bunch of dopamine-chasing, screen-obsessed creatures, like drunken monkeys chasing fleeting serotonin hits? Are we wasting our mental energy hoarding digital bananas - Likes, followers, and virtual status symbols - rather than pursuing real-world connection and meaning?

Excessive usage of technology isn’t good. It’s proven to reduce our cognitive abilities. Time spent absorbed into our phones harms our relationships with our loved ones, friends, and community. All the pointless comparisons make us unhappy, and the fear-mongering clickbait sparks feelings of panic. Our brains are struggling to process the exorbitant level of information we have access to in the Digital Age. And now with artificial intelligence (AI) infiltrating our attention spans, predicting our preferences, and subtly shaping our behaviors, the reflection that technology casts is increasingly influenced by systems designed to optimize engagement - not enlightenment. We aren’t just looking in the mirror anymore; we’re being driven by it.

Technology Didn’t Create Our Problems—It Just Revealed Them

But is technology really the problem we like to say it all is? Did the emergence of the Digital Age actually cause people to do bad things, or did it just make it more accessible, more traceable, and more documented?

Consider this: Did the adoption of Jodel at military academies "create" a culture of gender violence, or did it simply reveal one that was already lurking beneath the surface? Did access to explicit sites like PornHub "cause" select government employees to neglect their duties, or did monitoring software merely reveal pre-existing lapses in integrity? Technology access didn’t create these behaviors - it simply exposed them. Are we truly shocked when there’s another report of school children cyberbullying each other on social media, or did we know that kids raising themselves in our world results in little character development, but we didn’t care enough about that to get involved in mentoring and supporting the next generation in our own community?

Perhaps, we are so disturbed and disgusted by the reflection of humanity that technology provides us that we just want to villify the platform and shut it all down, unable to sit with the fact that the world we have all had a hand in creating has some serious problems. We conveniently avoid actually addressing these problems by distracting ourselves with more tech, such as “activism” on social media, endless consumption of brain-numbing memes, and replacing would-be enriching in-person engagements with excessive electronic communication.

Needed: A Human Response to Digital Dilemmas

Technology provides us a data-backed reflection of ourselves - a view of reality that has a way of dismantling our virtual fantasies -  spotlighting the stretch marks, the grey hairs, the wrinkles, the messy feelings that accompany our not-all-animal, not-all-saint human existence. Our collective engagement in cyberspace provides a reflection of ourselves that’s hard to unsee. We opted to invest our precious lives in a digital simulation as opposed to connecting with the real world around us. It was convenient, it was cheap, and it was seductive. But the things we search online, the content we consume, the areas of our lives we neglected so we could watch one more stupid video on a platform controlled by foreign adversaries have effects. And now, we’re living with the consequences of our actions.

Conveniently, we live in a world where the endless access to technology-facilitated distractions, from what’s trending online to our work emails, provides us with a perfect excuse to simply not think about the consequences. Technology entered society as a Pandora’s Box that we threw open and unleashed every single beast. We didn’t think about the implications of adoption; we simply wanted what we wanted when we wanted it - food delivered to our doorstep, fast fashion manufactured by slave labor in a third world country, and endless TV series to binge watch while we ignored the societal problems developing in our own neighborhood. When the reflection becomes too harsh to look at, we simply shoot the messenger and blame technology.

The Human Work Technology Can’t Do

If we actually wanted to fix things, we’d sit with the realities revealed in the reflection. Our communities are hurting. Our bodies are suffering. Our world needs more humanity in the spaces in which we seem hellbent on giving over to technology. Tech has become the kudzu of our society—like the invasive vine introduced in the American South to prevent erosion, it has grown out of control and now chokes out native plants, ecosystems, and communities. Similarly, technology began as a solution but has entangled itself in every facet of our lives, often smothering the very things it aimed to support.

In a world where everything is being analyzed, automated, and AI-generated, we desperately need humans who look past the endless stream of disruptive notifications and engage ethically and responsibly in our multi-domain world. Technology can be a wonderful tool, but we can’t lose our humanity as a result of it. Solutions to these problems require a non-technical approach. We must rebuild meaningful relationships, reinvigorate local community institutions, renew our connection to the natural world, and reengage with the spiritual dimensions of life, placing character and moral development at the center of how we educate the next generation. Those are not responsibilities we should shirk, leaving them to technology to automate them for us. Let’s use the reflection technology provides and channel true connections, contributions, and meaning in a way that leaves this world better than we found it.