“Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress.”
— Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
What is Humanity Over Technology about?
This is a publication about how communication technologies reshape human life. These tools do not merely transmit information; they reorganize attention, alter social incentives, mediate identity, and quietly redefine what a society takes to be normal. My premise is simple: technological progress is not the same thing as human progress. A society should judge its tools not only by what they make possible, but by what they encourage, displace, and degrade.
This is a publication that focuses on how communication technologies shape civic culture, childhood development, collective attention, and social trust, and on how a society should respond when its tools begin to erode the conditions of human flourishing.
Who is Alex Dean?
I am a software engineer at Amazon Web Services, where I work on distributed storage systems. I began writing this publication after spending much of college online during the COVID years and watching, at close range, how deeply technological mediation could shape education, memory, attention, and social life. I write as both a builder and a critic: someone who believes technology can expand human possibility, but only if we are willing to ask what kinds of lives and institutions our tools are training us to accept.
