"The solution to technology is not more technology"

Rebecca Solnit is one of those drop-everything writers for me, and it’s because her pieces have staying power. I find myself coming back to this post from The Guardian she wrote at the beginning of 2026.

You see a lot of discussion about how AI replaces people at work, but not as much discussion about how the same thing happens outside the office.

Have you noticed it, too? It seems to happen when we feel the pangs of loneliness, confusion, or, especially, insecurity. It's tempting to reach for the machine—ever patient and pliant—instead of peers and loved ones. The models offer what they can, but it mostly amounts to distraction. Echoes and shadows. It’s hard to be vulnerable in front of other people because their judgement matters, but that difficulty is what tells us there’s something worthy and real to be had.

Here’s what I highlighted:

You grow tomatoes for the process, not just the product, to garden as well as to eat. To do as well as to have.

Silicon Valley is full of tyrants of the quantifiable. For decades, its oligarchs have preached that our criteria for what we do and how we do it should be convenience, efficiency, productivity, profitability. They have told us that to go out into the world, to interact with others, is perilous, unpleasant, inefficient, a waste of time, and that time is something we should hoard rather than spend.

The price of giving up many activities is the atrophy of the ability to do them.

Love is too often discussed as a sort of good you want to stockpile, harvest, collect, even extract, but to be loved without loving is a sad accomplishment, a miser’s hoarding of someone else’s wealth. The work of loving is also the work of forging a self and a life.

I want to praise difficulty, not for its own sake, but because so much of what we want, we get through endeavours that are difficult. The difficulty is why doing something is rewarding; you have accomplished something, exerted effort and skill, stayed with the trouble, tested your limits, realised your intentions – or sometimes failed at all these things, and that too can be important, as can learning to survive failure.

Among the things real friends can do and AI cannot: bake you a cake or drive you home, hold your hand or live through a crisis or a celebration with you. And because of that difference people need to have real friends. More than that, people need real communities and social support systems.

The solution to technology is not more technology. The solution to loneliness is each other, a wealth that should be available to most of us most of the time. We need to rebuild or reinvent the ways and places in which we meet; we need to recognise them as the space of democracy, of joy, of connection, of love, of trust. Technology has stolen us from each other and in many ways from ourselves, and then tried to sell us substitutes. Stealing ourselves back, alas, is not as easy as walking out the door. We need somewhere to go and, more importantly, someone to go to who likewise desires to connect.

The connections that matter to our humanity are not only to each other. They’re with the whole natural and social world. Animals, wild and domestic, should be counted as part of the irreplaceable companionship that makes our lives meaningful and sometimes joyful. They remind us that there are many kinds of consciousness and that our species is itself not alone.