"Are You a Robot?"

Recently revisiting the theorizing about the "information age" of Alvin Toffler and others I have mainly focused on what has not happened. Our economic life did not "dematerialize" through the radically intensive substitution of information for material inputs in the way he described to produce a different form of civilization which has combined sustainability with abundance. This is exemplified by how where he thought the whole world would be running on renewables by 2025 well into 2024 we remain a long, long way away from any such future according to any conventional reckoning.

Rather than an information age civilization we have at best scraps of one--just as, contrary to the stupid technological hype ever-prevailing, we have only scraps of the imaginings of the past about how far technology was to have progressed by the early twenty-first century. Thus is it the case that, even though we are a long way from Blade Runner-style androids we find ourselves constantly subjected to a dumbed-down Voight-Kampff test as we roam the web, asked "Are You a Robot?" everywhere we go, precisely because a far, far more basic type of "bot" has proven enough to cause a very great deal of confusion within the very modest and ever more decrepit version of an Internet this civilization has managed to build.