We are repeatedly assured—quietly, implicitly—that technology is beneficial, inevitable, and continuous. Accepting this assurance has become a mark of sophistication, a moral alibi that aligns seamlessly—and not accidentally—with reverence for wealth and the wealthy. What enriches those at the top is treated as evidence of correctness. Profit becomes a proxy for proof. Wealth no longer merely signals power; it functions as epistemic validation. To doubt what succeeds financially is to appear unserious, out of step, naïve.
The problem is not technology as such, but the narratives that surround and sustain it. Technological systems no longer justify themselves by outcome but by momentum. They persist without needing to be right—only funded, embedded, and difficult to reverse. Evaluation quietly shifts from should this exist? to can this be stopped? Early gains are amplified and universalised; long-term costs are fragmented, delayed, and reframed as the unavoidable price of progress. Harm becomes ambient rather than attributable. The wealthy are not passive beneficiaries of this arrangement; they function as stabilisers. Their insulation from consequence damps correction, allowing misalignment to persist without triggering reform. Inequality, here, is not incidental. It is a control mechanism.
This arrangement rests on a deeper shift in what counts as truth. As systems scale, they no longer test their descriptions against the world directly. Reality is slow, uneven, and costly to consult. What scales instead is internal agreement. Descriptions are checked against other descriptions; metrics against targets; models against prior models. When everything lines up, the system treats the result as reliable. Truth quietly migrates from correspondence to coherence. What matters is not whether an account answers to lived experience, but whether it integrates smoothly into the machinery already in motion. The system comes to believe its own outputs. Contradiction is dismissed as anecdote. Drift is renamed adjustment.
What is sold as inevitability is abdication of responsibility. What is sold as benefit is selective accounting. What is sold as continuity is deferral. In this regime, coherence substitutes for truth, persistence substitutes for legitimacy, and wealth substitutes for justification. Technological gullibility is not naïveté; it is complicity in a structure where systems that reproduce themselves are treated as correct, and systems that answer to reality are quietly priced out of consideration.
Daedelus Kite 