At the risk of sounding a bit Shakespearean, there are many tragedies in life.
I realise the world has more than its fair share of problems at the moment, but one of the greatest tragedies is that our lives are being stripped of all the nuance, all the layers, all the individuality which – taken together – are what makes humans human.
I’m certain we’ll come to regret this modern-day belief that superficiality matters more than depth, that the volume of output matters more than its quality, and that the tech industry’s dehumanising ideology is somehow better than putting humans at the heart of our decision-making.
In the end, humans always break out of those belief systems, because eventually they collapse under the weight of their own undelivered promises.
But it can take a while. Communism lasted for over 60 years in the former Soviet Union, for example. It wasn’t that people living under communist oppression were happy, it just took some time for the forces of resistance to build up a critical mass big enough to do something about it.
I’m pretty sure the tech industry will follow the same path, because their playbook is pretty much right out of the Soviet communist party’s playbook – implement a rigid ideology to control the masses, send anyone who doesn’t agree with that ideology to a “digital Siberia” where their views are marginalised to the point where they can no longer harm the rulers, and introduce widespread surveillance of every online movement they make to keep everyone in line.
Not that I’m anti-tech – I’ve spent most of my career implementing new, improved technology to improve efficiency in a wide range of organisations. But I am firmly against tech that isn’t reliable enough to do the right thing often enough that you can trust the results it puts out.
I never worry about whether Sage or Xero has added up the numbers on a balance sheet correctly. When I see that AI doesn’t know how many days there are in the week, I’m less than convinced that the “Digital Politburo” trying to implement AI in everywhere we touch knows what on earth they’re doing.
And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my career so far, it’s that you should never listen to people who don’t know what they’re doing. We’re being ideologically corralled by a technology which doesn’t even work all that well, which is little short of insane, from my perspective.
Puppets
In essence, the tech industry believes that the rest of humanity are mere puppets to be manipulated at will with carefully-controlled dozes of dopamine which can be turbo-charged with non-stop online rage-bait to keep people hooked long enough to count as an ad impression for everyone doom-scrolling on their phone.
We know how this will end because, for all their many other faults, Silicon Valley didn’t invent the concept of manipulating other human beings for their own ends.
Every totalitarian regime which ever existed has owed their existence – for however long or short a period of time – to their ability to manipulate their subjects to keep the vast majority of them in-line and at least largely compliant.
While it’s true that Silicon Valley didn’t invent psychological manipulation, it would be true that they have excelled at putting rocket-fuel into the same strategies that every dictator who ever lived deployed to hold onto power for as long as humanly possible.
In fact, it’s such an obvious play, I am always amazed that so many otherwise intelligent people seem to be taken in by the slick PR, and can’t see the immense harm the tech industry is doing. Or, if they can, they convince themselves that all the downsides are a price worth paying for some “greater good”.
“Sure, it’s not nice to send all those innocent people to the gulags in Siberia. But if we didn’t do that, the rest of the population wouldn’t unthinkingly do our bidding, which could result in the defeat of communism itself!” was, I’m sure, the sort of thing people said in the Kremlin in the 1930s.
It’s not that far away from the approach Big Tech takes towards the rest of humanity in the 21st century.
The thing about being a puppet, though, is that however comfortable your life might be, and notwithstanding the occasional dopamine hit along the way to keep you interested, you’ll never come out on top.
The end-game is already in play. The puppet-masters are just stringing you along (pun intended).
As with all the great challenges faced by humanity down the centuries, if you want an answer to a complex human problem, a good place to turn is in the direction of poets and songwriters. The very best poets and songwriters do a great job of encapsulating humanity’s biggest dilemmas in just a handful of words.
Consider this from Sandie Shaw’s 1967 Eurovision Song Contest winning entry “Puppet on a String”:
I may win on the roundabout
Then I’ll lose on the swings
In or out, there is never a doubt
Just who’s pulling the strings
I’m all tied up in you
But where’s it leading me to?
Written by Bill Martin and Phil Coulter, “Puppet on a String” also spent three weeks at the Number One spot in the UK charts in 1967.
Despite the jaunty tone of “Puppet on a String”, the song was about a much darker subject matter than a casual listener might suspect: “I wonder if one day that, you’ll say that, you care / If you say you love me madly, I’ll gladly, be there / Like a puppet on a string”.
More puppets
At least to a UK audience, “Puppet on a String” is probably the most famous Eurovision song about puppets, but it’s far from the only song on the subject.
I might argue that…shock-horror…it isn’t even the best song about puppets to appear on the Eurovision stage.
Two years before Sandie Shaw’s “Puppet on a String” won in 1967, the Eurovision winner in 1965 was another one on the subject of puppets. France Gall won for Luxembourg that year with the Serge Gainsbourg composition “Poupée de cire, poupée de son” (very roughly translated as “Wax Doll, Speaking Doll”).
(If the name Serge Gainsbourg is familiar to you, for us Brits he is probably best known for writing and performing “Je t’aime” with Jane Birkin – a 1967 song which so scandalised the BBC due to its eroticised moaning and groaning that the record was banned from the airwaves.)
1965’s “Poupée de cire, poupée de son” is often credited as the first true pop song to win the Eurovision Song Contest, but I’ll let you be the judge of that – I’ve linked it below.
However, whatever else those songs are, they are not the best Eurovision song on the subject of life as a puppet. That honour, at least in my view, goes to the phenomenal “La poupée monte le son”, Luxembourg’s 2025 entry for Laura Thorn, and a song which should have won the entire contest, in my view. But sadly it was not to be.
For Eurovision fans, and lovers of music trivia more generally, Laura Thorn’s 2025 Eurovision performance for Luxembourg started with a delightful little nod to France Gall’s Eurovision winner for Luxembourg 60 years earlier.
But Laura Thorn took a much more defiant line, essentially saying that she’d had enough of someone else pulling her strings and she was now taking control of her own life.
Her performance, the staging, the little nod to France Gall, the lyrics (in French, but beautifully constructed), the costume, and the dancers pretty much achieved Eurovision perfection for me. I was gutted that “La poupée monte le son” (written by Christophe Houssin, Julien Salvia, and Ludovic-Alexandre Vidal) didn’t win.
But sometimes it isn’t just about winning.
I’m sure that plenty of people “lost” when they were trying to overturn communism during the Cold War. They ended up in the gulags, or worse, for their trouble.
But every step along the way, including those which were unsuccessful at the time, took the world a step closer to the end of communism’s fundamentally anti-human belief system.
For those of us old enough to remember the tail end of the Cold War, we celebrated the end of a system which enslaved humans as mere tools to be deployed in the service of an oppressive, overarching ideology which impoverished and enslaved hundreds of millions of people…an overt enthusiasm for which was how the Party apparatchiks got their dacha in the country, their seat on the Politburo, and the comforts from the West which were denied to most of the population.
As The Bottom Line Bulletin goes into hibernation for a while, my hope is that more people will realise that, for all the miracles technology has brought us, it can only take us so far.
We don’t need technology which, in aggregate, generates a greater economic and societal cost than the benefits it delivers. That does nothing for anyone except the members of the “Digital Politburo”.
Like Laura Thorn, I hope we stop being puppets who unthinkingly do the bidding of our tech overlords, especially when that’s to our own detriment.
It’s time to take back control and deploy technology only where there’s a demonstrable benefit, across the entire end-to-end process, and all the externalities have been factored in.
Only then will we be able to see who’s been pulling our strings all along, and perhaps start to do something about it.