How Engineered Dependency Erases Our Autonomy

Picture this: Your smartphone dies while you’re on a trip, and suddenly, you’re helpless—unable to navigate, pay, or even access your hotel reservation. This isn’t hypothetical; it’s our reality. According to DataReportal’s ‘Digital 2024 Global Overview Report‘ the average person now spends over 7 hours daily on digital devices, with 47% reporting anxiety when separated from their phones. What once was a minor inconvenience has now become a crisis, revealing how deeply we’ve integrated technology into our daily existence—from ordering coffee to proving our identity.

George Orwell envisioned a dystopia of forced submission, but he missed something crucial: people willingly surrendering their freedoms for convenience. As Shoshana Zuboff details in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, this willingness to trade privacy for convenience represents a fundamental shift in how power operates in the digital age. We don’t need Big Brother watching us—we invite surveillance into our homes through smart speakers, security cameras, and connected appliances, all in the name of making life easier.

We don’t just accept this surveillance; we’ve internalized it as a necessary trade-off. “Don’t worry,” we’re told, “your data’s safe, and you’ll get better recommendations and smarter services in return.” We’ve become so accustomed to being watched that we defend our watchers, developing an almost pathological attachment to the very systems that constrain us.

Consider airport security. After 9/11, Americans accepted increasingly invasive TSA procedures, promising both safety and convenience. Two decades later, we dutifully remove our shoes—trained like obedient pets to follow the security theater because one lunatic tried to hide explosives in his boots almost 25 years ago—submit to full-body scans, and surrender water bottles. Yet airport security is neither convenient nor demonstrably more effective. Just as we unquestioningly remove our shoes at airports, we’ve unquestioningly handed over our most private information for the promise of convenience.

I witnessed this shift firsthand during my two decades in tech. When Google launched Gmail, marketing it as a ‘free’ service, I warned friends they were actually paying with their data. The old adage proved true: when something’s free online, you’re not the customer—you’re the product. Many laughed, calling me paranoid.

A satirical video called ‘The Google Toilet‘ perfectly captured this moment, showing how we’d willingly trade our most intimate data for convenience. The video seemed absurd when it was made 15 years ago—now it feels prophetic. Today, that same company—which I recently exposed as having deep ties to the intelligence community from its inception—tracks our location, listens to our conversations, and knows more about our daily habits than our closest friends. Even after Snowden revealed the extent of digital surveillance, most people shrugged. The convenience was worth the cost—until it wasn’t just our data at stake, but our very ability to function independently.

The Tyranny of “Smart” Everything

According to Consumer Reports, over 87% of major appliances sold in 2023 included ‘smart’ features, making it nearly impossible to find basic models. When I needed a dryer recently, I found nearly every model was ‘smart,’ requiring Wi-Fi connectivity and app integration. I didn’t want a dryer that could tweet; I just wanted one that dried clothes. When the plumber came to install it—because of course, I never learned how to do that myself—he complained that he needed an engineering degree just to repair modern appliances.

This isn’t just about dryers. Every household item is becoming smart: thermostats, doorknobs, lightbulbs, toasters. My father could disassemble and rebuild a car engine in our garage. Today, you can’t even change the oil in some vehicles without accessing the car’s computer system. We’ve lost more than just mechanical skills—we’ve lost the confidence to try fixing things ourselves. When everything requires specialized software and proprietary tools, DIY becomes impossible by design.

The loss of cursive writing exemplifies this decline. Aside from its benefits for cognitive ability, this isn’t just about penmanship; it’s about cultural continuity and independence. A generation unable to read cursive becomes dependent on digital translations of their own history—whether it’s the Declaration of Independence or their grandparents’ love letters. This disconnection from our past isn’t just convenient; it’s a form of cultural amnesia that makes us more reliant on curated, digitized versions of history.

The core vision of the maker movement—empowering people to create, repair, and understand the physical world around them—offers a blueprint for resisting engineered dependency. Communities are already establishing tool libraries where residents can borrow equipment and learn basic repairs. Neighborhood repair cafes are emerging, where people gather to fix broken items and share knowledge. Local food co-ops and community gardens aren’t just about organic produce—they’re about understanding how to feed ourselves without corporate supply chains. Even simple acts like maintaining physical book collections and paper records become radical when digital censorship looms. These aren’t just hobbies—they’re acts of resistance against a system that profits from our helplessness.

The Fiat Nature of Digital Control

Just as central banks declare the value of currency by decree, tech companies now declare what constitutes convenience in our lives. We don’t choose these systems—they’re imposed upon us, much like fiat currency. Want a “dumb” appliance? Sorry, that option has been declared obsolete. Want to repair your own devices? That’s been engineered out of existence.

I explored this concept of imposed systems more deeply in my essay “Fiat Everything,” examining how artificial scarcity and control extend far beyond just money—into food, health, education, and information. The same principles that allow central banks to conjure currency from nothing now enable tech companies to declare what’s “necessary” in our daily lives.

This isn’t mere technological progress—it’s a system of control. Just as fiat money derives value from collective belief, modern ‘convenience’ derives its appeal not from genuine utility, but from manufactured necessity. We’re told we need smart devices, cloud storage, and constant connectivity, not because they serve us, but because they serve the system that profits from our dependence.

The push toward a cashless society represents the ultimate expression of this control. As I warned two years ago in “From Covid to CBDC“, the elimination of physical currency isn’t just about efficiency—it’s about creating a system where every transaction can be monitored, approved, or denied. Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) promise convenience while building the architecture for absolute financial surveillance and control.

Just as vaccine passports normalized showing papers to participate in society, digital-only payments normalize the idea that our transactions require institutional approval. Imagine a world where your money has an expiration date, where purchases can be blocked based on your social credit score, or where your savings can be turned off if you post the wrong opinion online. This isn’t speculation—China’s social credit system already demonstrates how digital money becomes a tool for enforcing compliance.

The Death of the Maker Movement

For a brief moment in the late aughts and early 2010s, it seemed we might resist this tide of engineered dependency. The maker movement emerged, exemplified by spaces like 3rd Ward in Brooklyn—a sprawling 30,000-square-foot collective workspace where artists, craftspeople, and entrepreneurs could access tools, learn skills, and build community. Online platforms like Kickstarter emerged simultaneously, enabling creators to build audiences and fund innovative projects directly, bypassing traditional gatekeepers.

Yet something shifted. The closure of 3rd Ward in 2013 marked more than just the end of a workspace—it represented the commercialization of the maker ethos itself. The space had taught crucial lessons about sustainable community-driven education and skill-sharing, but these lessons were lost as the movement became increasingly profit-driven. While some positive elements remain—I’m writing this on Substack, after all, which empowers independent writers—much of the maker movement’s substance was replaced by performative creation. Instead of actually making things, we settled for watching others make things on YouTube.

There’s something deeply human about the urge to create, to build, to understand how things work—yet modernity has reshaped us from makers into spectators, content to experience creativity vicariously through our screens. The authentic drive for self-reliance was transformed into carefully curated content, with ‘makers’ becoming influencers selling the aesthetic of craftsmanship rather than the skills themselves.

The question now is whether we’re truly enlightening one another through these platforms, or merely following the OnlyFans model of commodifying (and debasing) every human interaction.

Digital Personas and the Loss of Self

Social media hasn’t just weaponized our vanity—it’s transformed us from humans into curated digital performances. Our phones have become portable propaganda machines for our personal brands. Meta’s own internal research revealed that Instagram makes body image issues worse for 32% of teen girls, yet we continue embracing these platforms. We photograph every meal before tasting it, document every vacation moment instead of experiencing it, and craft the illusion of perfect lives while sitting alone in our apartments, sipping photogenic wine and numbing ourselves with Netflix.

The health implications are staggering. According to a 2023 CDC study, depression rates among young adults have doubled since 2011, with the sharpest increases correlating with social media usage patterns. We’re trading genuine human connection for digital dopamine hits, real conversations for emoji reactions, and authentic experiences for performative posts. The convenience of instant digital connection has created a generation more connected yet more isolated than ever before.

As we perfect our digital performances, we increasingly rely on artificial tools to maintain these carefully crafted personas—leading us into an even deeper form of dependency.

The AI Trap

Perhaps most alarming is our growing dependence on artificial intelligence. We’re outsourcing our thinking to AI, but as we do, we risk eroding our own cognitive autonomy. In the same way that we’ve allowed our physical strength to weaken by relying on technology, our mental muscles are becoming flabby—unused and atrophying.

Students now turn to ChatGPT before attempting to solve problems themselves. Professionals rely on AI to draft emails, reports, and presentations without developing these critical skills themselves. Writers increasingly lean on AI assistance rather than honing their craft. Each time we defer to AI for tasks we could do ourselves, we’re not just choosing convenience—we’re choosing to let another human capability atrophy.

Just as we’ve forgotten how to repair our own devices, we risk forgetting how to think deeply and independently. The danger isn’t that AI will become too intelligent, but that we’ll become too dependent on it—unable to analyze, create, or problem-solve without digital assistance. We’re building a world where independent thought becomes as rare as mechanical skill, where cognitive self-reliance is seen as inefficient rather than essential.

Reclaiming Liberty

The solution isn’t rejecting all technology—it’s understanding the true cost of convenience. Before adopting each new “smart” innovation, ask yourself:

• What capability am I surrendering? 
• Can I function if this system fails? 
• Is the convenience worth the dependency? 
• What’s the real price—in privacy, skills, and autonomy?
• How does this technology shape my behavior and thinking? 

We must actively cultivate independence alongside innovation. Learn basic repair skills. Keep physical copies of important documents—and books—because, given the rise of the censorship industrial complex, we can’t be sure how long they’ll be available in digital form. Know how to read a map, write without AI, and survive when the internet fails. True freedom isn’t found in having everything at our fingertips—it’s in maintaining the capability to live without those conveniences when necessary.

The irony isn’t lost on me. I spent decades as a knowledge worker in technology, precisely where society wanted me—in front of screens, building digital products, becoming the very kind of specialist I’m now critiquing. Like many of my generation, I learned some simple coding before I learned to fix a leaky faucet or grow my own food. I still love technology and believe in its potential to automate mundane tasks, freeing us to pursue higher forms of creativity and connection—but this promise rings hollow if we sacrifice our fundamental capabilities in the process.

The most dangerous aspect of this trade-off isn’t the loss of privacy—it’s the loss of awareness that we’re losing anything at all. We’re not just losing skills and privacy; we’re losing the ability to recognize what independence feels like. The question isn’t whether convenience is worth the cost of liberty—it’s whether we’ll recognize what we’ve lost before we forget we ever had it.