The privilege of pessimism: The politics of despair towards the digital and the moral imperative to hope

Abstract

The West is suffering from ‘pessimism paralysis’ – a despair towards the digital. This stands against the contagion of hope towards new technologies among young people, most of whom live in the Global South and have fast come online due to increasingly cheap mobile phones and data plans. The digital, despite the risks of surveillance and control, offers these young people with the possibility of a little more freedom to find pleasure, leisure, and spaces for self-actualization. While fears and concerns around new technology are legitimate, they become critically meaningful when they fairly account for the full spectrum of human sentiment driven by diverse lived experiences. Pessimism is a privilege for those who can afford to live with despair. It is our moral imperative to hope as this collective belief can be harnessed to align the digital with global social flourishing.

Introduction

The West is suffering from ‘pessimism paralysis’ (Arora, 2024) – a despair towards the digital. This stands against the contagion of hope towards digital transformations among young people, most of whom live in the Global South and have fast come online due to increasingly cheap mobile phones and data plans. Relative to their constrictive political and socio-economic conditions and materiality, and despite the risks of surveillance and control, the digital offers these young people the possibility of a little more freedom to find pleasure, leisure, and spaces for self-actualization. While fears and concerns around new technology are legitimate, they become critically meaningful when they fairly account for the full spectrum of human sentiment driven by diverse lived experiences. Pessimism is a privilege for those who can afford to live in despair. The rest of the world has little choice but to be optimistic as their future depends on it.

The politics of despair

Mainstream media headlines underline how artificial intelligence might kill our jobs (Greenhouse, 2023), destroy our civilization (Harari, 2023), and even pose a risk of extinction (The New York Times, 2023). In the last decade, digital innovations have fuelled books that promise doomsday at your doorstep, where algorithms are racist and oppressive (Noble, 2018), technologies are designed to evoke sadness (Lovink, 2019) and evil (Nodder, 2013), and where online platforms track and trap us in a surveillance state (Zuboff, 2023). The culture of critique is essential to better our systems. However, it can sediment into a culture of paralyzing pessimism when chronically disproportionate or even disengaged from narratives and experiences of success, pleasure, hope, and happiness.

This negative effect pivots policymakers to divest their energies towards breaking up over building tech. Anti-market and anti-capitalist sentiment prevails as a Eurocentric academic project (Muradian, 2019), as opposed to the ‘rational optimists’ (Yeh et al., 2021) in the Global South – publics that come with a deep yearning to participate in the digital economy and are prepared to grapple with the tradeoffs that ensue when leapfrogging into their development futures. Connectivity moreover is increasingly framed as a pathway to data colonialism (Couldry and Mejias, 2019), and may lay a dangerous foundation for aid agencies to rationalize not connecting the unconnected.

Contagion of hope

Connectivity is a right as the digital becomes pervasive across our lives. The Global South in particular has benefited substantively from becoming digitized despite the risks and harms. The digital has helped many of their countries include the chronically excluded into welfare, banking, education and other essential institutional services (Arora, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c). Global citizenship surveys over the decade capture a striking fact: While young people in the West feel dismal about the future, the majority of youth in Nigeria, Peru, China, and India see themselves as global citizens and are enthusiastic about their place in the world (Arora, 2024).

The Varkey Foundation assessed Gen Z across 20 countries, those born between 1995 and 2001, on their perspectives of well-being. China and India have the highest percentage of young people who believe that the world is becoming a better place. In Europe, especially in France and Italy, young people feel that their future is bleak. The report finds a clear division between the optimism of the ‘developing world’ and the pessimism of the ‘developed world.’ A 2022 UNESCO report found similar attitudinal differences between the Global North and South (Tao et al., 2022), but revealed that youth across contexts are committed to building their knowledge and engaging with technology to shape their lives.

New technology, old sentiment

Binary narratives of the dystopic/utopic and negative/positive kind are inscribed into the academic fabric of debates around new technologies. Yet, as Raymond Williams argues, this is little more than posturing, as ‘experience moves within an actual situation, in directions which the forces within that situation will alone determine’ (Williams, 1983: 209). Binary forces of pessimism/optimism tend to fall along disciplinary lines with the former typically driven by the humanities and social sciences, while the latter fuelled by the fields of business and innovation, and development studies.

A case in point is the field of education technology. Neil Selwyn (2011: 713) argues that it's a closed field of academic study committed to viewing the digital as a means of betterment while he believes that the ‘pessimistic stance is the most sensible, and possibly the most productive, perspective to take.’ Camps are set, serving as counterproductive to interdisciplinary thinking, which is urgently needed to address today's global contemporary challenges around inequality, the climate crisis, and global security and peace.

Tensions between narratives and lived realities are amplified by their regional embedding, and tends to gain differential disciplinary treatment. For instance, media studies is more preoccupied with privacy and control and draws substantively from empirical evidence and concerns from the Global North, relegating the Global South and their yearning for visibility and engagement to the fields of development studies and social entrepreneurship (Arora, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c). Furthermore, a historical examination of technological innovation reveals that doomsday narratives are frequently propagated by those who benefit from the status quo, and are often the slowest to change (Mendelsohn, 1994). The propagation of fear serves as a means of resistance against the disruptive potential of emerging technologies, maintaining the existing power structures.

Paradox to plurality

It is tempting to encase the dichotomies of sentiment between the Global North and South as what I call the ‘pessimism paradox’ to explain away different cultural perceptions toward the digital. That would inadvertently hyper-exoticize regional differences. It would shift our focus away from lived experiences and our need to go beyond binaries to unravel how technologies impact and are impacted by human experience.

For instance, the ‘pessimism paradox’ approach highlights the contradiction between individuals expressing concerns or depression about new technologies while still embracing and utilizing them. Despite apprehensions about technology's potential negative impacts on mental health and social interactions, people often integrate these tools meaningfully into their daily lives. The digital has become fundamental spaces within which we play, love, work, and everything in between. Users especially living in states with weaker institutions and infrastructures, often make choices based on the needs for access, value efficiency, and user-friendly digital interfaces over that of privacy concerns.

Critics may view this paradox as indicative of cognitive dissonance or a failure to prioritize well-being over convenience or societal expectations. They may advocate for the digital to be contained and controlled. On the contrary, this is less of a paradox and more of a plurality of human experiences dictating their choices and affective states towards new technologies. Plurality acknowledges technology's multifaceted nature, understanding that its impacts are contingent on interactions among users, designers, policymakers, and societal norms.

Moreover, as Danaher (2022: 54) argues, there is a case to be made for a modest ‘agency-based optimism,’ that focuses on the power of the collective to cultivate a belief that technology can be used to achieve goals that align with the wellbeing of society. This stands against the deterministic techno-optimism narrative that doesn’t meaningfully integrate the social efforts to leverage this sentiment to survive and even thrive. The digital, much like other forms of human creativity demands an ongoing culture of care if we are to align it with universal rights and aspirational futures, which includes the rest of the world.

By breaking out of the pessimism bubble, we can go beyond the North–South binary and strive for a meaningful relationship with technology that enhances human flourishing while mitigating potential harms. Hope is not an option. It is a moral imperative for an inclusive and responsible digital future.