Are You a Determinist? Does Technology Drive You?

Before you read this, answer honestly. Nobody’s watching — except, of course, the algorithm.

Here is a question that sounds philosophical but is actually practical: does technology shape the way you think, or do you shape the way you use technology?

Most people, asked this directly, say the second thing. They are in control. They choose which apps to open, which platforms to use, when to put the phone down. Technology is a tool. Tools don’t have agendas.

This book — Well… How Did We Get Here? — spends eleven chapters suggesting this is the most important thing most of us get wrong. Not because we’re naive, but because the shaping happens at a level below the choices we consciously make. The question isn’t whether you chose to open Instagram. It’s what Instagram was doing to your sense of what a normal life looks like while you were deciding whether to open it.

Technological determinism is the formal name for the idea that technology shapes human society in ways that aren’t fully under human control — that the tools we build develop their own logic, their own requirements, their own momentum, and that over time we adapt to them more than they adapt to us.

Before we get into what that actually means, try this first.

The Quiz

Four scenarios. Two responses each. Pick the one that sounds more like you — not the one that sounds smarter.

Scenario 1: The notification

You are in the middle of something — a conversation, a book, a piece of work you’re actually enjoying. Your phone buzzes. You haven’t looked at it yet. You don’t know what it is.

A. I’ll finish this first. It can wait.

B. I’m aware of it now. Part of my attention is already over there.

Scenario 2: The platform

A social platform you use regularly changes its algorithm. Content you used to enjoy is buried. Content that makes you vaguely anxious seems to surface constantly. You find yourself spending more time scrolling, feeling worse, getting less of what you came for.

A. I’d notice this, decide it wasn’t working for me, and leave or significantly reduce my use.

B. I’d notice I felt worse, but I’d probably keep using it. There’s still enough there to keep coming back.

Scenario 3: The map

You used to know your city reasonably well. You could navigate several routes from memory, felt the shape of different neighbourhoods, had a rough sense of distance and direction. Since you started using navigation apps for every journey, you’ve noticed you no longer quite know where you are without them.

A. I’ve been aware of this and I’ve deliberately navigated some routes from memory to keep the skill.

B. Yes, that’s roughly true of me. I’m not sure I could get across town without the app now.

Scenario 4: The opinion

You hold a view on a contested topic — political, social, cultural. You’ve held it for a few years. When you try to recall how you arrived at it, you find it difficult to reconstruct the reasoning. You know you believe it strongly. You’re not entirely sure how the belief got there.

A. I can trace most of my significant views back to specific experiences, conversations or things I’ve read.

B. Some of my strongest views have a fuzzy origin. I know what I think. I’m less clear on the why.

What Your Answers Suggest

If you answered mostly A: you are describing yourself as someone who exercises genuine conscious agency over your relationship with technology. Either that’s true — in which case you are in a small and genuinely impressive minority — or the question of control is something you prefer not to examine too closely. Both are worth sitting with.

If you answered mostly B: you are describing what the research, the philosophy, and the lived experience of several billion people across the last two decades consistently suggests is the normal human relationship with the technologies we’ve built. You are not weak-willed or unusually susceptible. You are living inside a set of systems designed, with considerable sophistication and at enormous expense, to produce exactly that relationship.

If you answered a mix of both: good. The honest answer to most of these questions is somewhere in between, and the mix itself is informative. Where you answered A, those are the areas where you’ve retained genuine agency. Where you answered B, those are the areas where the shaping has taken hold. The interesting question isn’t your overall score — it’s the pattern.

What Technological Determinism Actually Means

Here is where most introductions to this idea go wrong. They describe technological determinism as a fatalistic position — the idea that technology is an unstoppable force and human beings are helpless in its path. That version exists, and Well… How Did We Get Here? examines it, particularly in the work of Jacques Ellul, whose argument that modern technique has developed a self-perpetuating logic entirely beyond human control is the hardest and most uncomfortable form the position takes.

But the more useful and more honest version of the argument isn’t fatalistic at all. It says something more like this: the technologies we build are not neutral. They have architectures, and those architectures favour certain behaviours over others, certain thoughts over others, certain kinds of people and certain kinds of power over others. You are not helpless. But you are not swimming in neutral water. You are swimming in water that has a current, and the current has a direction, and most of the time you are so busy swimming that you haven’t noticed which way you’re going.

The scenario with the navigation app is the cleanest illustration of this in everyday life. Nobody decided to become worse at navigating. Nobody made a conscious choice to outsource their spatial memory to a device. But the capability atrophied anyway, gradually, invisibly, because the technology made it unnecessary to use it. You didn’t choose that outcome. The technology’s logic produced it.

This is what the political theorist Langdon Winner called the politics of artefacts — the idea that designed objects are never neutral, that they carry built-in assumptions about how the world should be organised and who should be in charge of it. A city built around the car doesn’t just make driving convenient. It makes not driving inconvenient, reorders where shops and schools and jobs can be, changes the shape of communities, and does all of this without ever asking anyone whether that’s what they wanted. The technology made the choices, at a structural level, that no individual would ever have made explicitly.

The Attention Chapter and What It Means for Scenario 2

Chapter Eight of Well… How Did We Get Here? is the chapter that most readers tell me unsettled them most. It deals with the attention economy — the architecture by which the major platforms monetise your time and engagement — and specifically with Shoshana Zuboff’s argument in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism that what’s being sold is not just your attention but your future behaviour.

The scenario about the platform changing its algorithm and you feeling worse but continuing to use it is not, in this framework, a failure of willpower. It is the intended outcome. The algorithm’s job is not to make you feel good. Its job is to maximise engagement, and the most reliable driver of engagement, across all the research the platforms have done on human psychology, turns out to be emotional arousal — including negative emotional arousal. Anxiety, outrage, and unease keep you scrolling more reliably than contentment does.

The reason you answered B to that scenario, if you did, is not because you’re unusually weak. It’s because you are dealing with an optimisation system running on behavioural data from billions of users, refined over years, specifically designed to make leaving feel slightly more difficult than staying. That is not a fair fight. The question technological determinism asks is not whether you lost that fight. It’s whether you knew you were in one.

The Opinion Question and the Filter Bubble

Scenario 4 is the one most people find most uncomfortable, and the discomfort is the point. The question of how you came to hold your strongest beliefs is one of the most important questions anyone can ask themselves, and it’s one that the architecture of the modern information environment has made systematically harder to answer honestly.

The filter bubble — the term coined by Eli Pariser, examined in Chapter Nine of the book — is not simply the idea that algorithms show you content you already agree with. It’s the deeper point that over time, a personalised information environment doesn’t just confirm existing beliefs. It shapes which beliefs feel like obvious common sense and which feel like positions that need defending. It moves the baseline of what seems normal, what seems mainstream, what seems like the kind of thing reasonable people think — and it does this so gradually and so thoroughly that the beliefs feel entirely your own, arrived at independently, self-evidently correct.

They may well be correct. That’s almost the harder problem. The issue isn’t that you were fed false information. The issue is that you can no longer fully audit the path by which you came to think what you think. And that audit — the ability to trace your own reasoning, to know where your convictions came from — is one of the things that makes independent thought independent rather than merely individual.

So Are You a Determinist?

Here is the answer the book arrives at, after eleven chapters of examining the hard and the soft versions of the position, the historical evidence, the philosophical arguments, and the lived experience of the last thirty years of digital life.

You are not fully determined. Human agency is real, human choice is real, and the history of technology includes genuine examples of people and communities pushing back against the grain of powerful systems and winning. Open source software — the subject of one of the book’s early chapters — is the most striking large-scale example: a community that decided the dominant commercial logic of software development was wrong, built an alternative on entirely different principles, and changed the architecture of the internet as a result.

But you are not as free as you think you are. The shaping is real, it operates below the level of conscious choice, it has been deliberately engineered by some of the most sophisticated systems human beings have ever built, and it is accelerating. The question is not whether to accept it or reject it. The question is whether you have noticed it — and whether, having noticed it, you are willing to take seriously what noticing it asks of you.

That is the question Well… How Did We Get Here? was written to help you ask. The quiz above is where it starts. The book is where it gets complicated, specific, and — I hope — genuinely useful.

Well… How Did We Get Here? Technology, humanity, and who made who is available now in paperback and Kindle, worldwide. If Scenario 2 or Scenario 4 made you uncomfortable, that’s probably a good reason to read it.