Technorealists, the silent majority? - Openness Praxis<br>Openness Praxis<br>Technorealists, the silent majority?<br>you might find yourself standing in the unremarkable center<br>Erlend Sogge Heggen
August 03, 2026
Share
Centrism is most widely understood to be a political stance between two extremes a left-to-right polarity. It can serve a useful role, especally in multi-party systems where the centrists represent a spectrum of real political platforms rather than the inneffectual bothsidesing it amounts to in the binary system of the USA.<br>It's an especially aggravating stance when the two extremes aren't so much political as they are existential. On the one hand we've got a global elite of business-as-usual conglomerates hellbent on growing for growth's sake until something pops so bad it'll ring our ears for generations to come.<br>Meanwhile the global majority agrees we desperately need systems change, but we're still figuring out exactly what that ought to look like and how we can possibly wrest enough power away from the CEO-class to implement said changes.<br>Cue the centrist coming in to say both sides are taking it too far and the status-quo is not that bad actually, it just needs a few incremental tweaks, from fascism to not-quite-so-much fascism.<br>There's no left or right to quibble about here. There are 3500 prison owners and 8.3 billion of us living inside their walls1.<br>Social media hates a centrist<br>Western social media in particular has been shaped in the mold of US two-party politics, so the centrist position is tantamount to "voting independent", which is how you draw the ire of 99% of the population instead of just the "opposing" other half.<br>In the painfully limiting context of American political discourse this aversion to the middle ground is appropriate, but applied generally it's dysfunctional. Cars have their uses, and so do bikes. Most people share the centrist position that both modes of transport serve a legitimate purpose.<br>But social media thrives on extremes. That's where outrage happens, driving clicks and impressions. You'll never hear from the people in the middle because their opinions are boringly sensible and uncontroversial.<br>Spiritually centered<br>Many wisdom traditions consider centrism - that is, to be mindfully centered - nothing less than the path to enlightenment.<br>The Middle Way refers to a spiritual practice that steers clear of both extreme asceticism and sensual indulgence.
The second formulation, "teaching the Dharma by the middle," refers to how the Buddha's Dharma (Teaching) approaches ontological issues of existence and personal identity by avoiding eternalism (or absolutism) and annihilationism (or nihilism).<br>Our collective failure to live these teachings hit me flat in the face every day as I open my social feed and do my best to mentally filter out the incessant arguing between technological boosters and doomers.<br>Neither group will readily agree with that derogatory labeling, but they have nonetheless picked a tribal side in what their social media feed of outrage porn paints as a simple binary. Everything they hear about "the other side" is the most extreme example.
"There's no such thing as a good data center" vs "If you like the internet you have to like data centers"
"AI isn't good for anything" vs "AI is the best thing ever and it's gonna be 10x better by next year"
"All money is rooted in evil" vs "Capitalism is the only practical coordination-mechanism we've got; there is no alternative."
None of this is representative of common sense in the wider populace; the common ground that's invariably surfaced by having a good-faith conversation for more than 10 minutes. Once you get past the rapid-fire soundbites into "oh sure, if you put it (sensibly, boringly) like that"-territory, the middle way prevails more often than not.<br>Common sense majority<br>Most people don't actually hate data centers as a whole, they just object to them being built everywhere all at once against the popular will of directly affected locals.<br>Most people don't want to take your coding agent away, they just want their google searches to return actual websites again.<br>Most people understand the value of businesses, but they're fed up with the repeated overreach of big business that have long since stopped playing by the rules all the rest of us are bound by.<br>Yes, AI has an increasing number of legitimate uses, especially and unsurprisingly in the STEM field from which it originated. And yes, AI is the product of a dominator culture that has yet to properly reckon with its anti-social origins and internal programming premised on extraction. Both are true, and neither can be properly understood in denial of the other.<br>The extent to which our latest technological innovation works isn't the real point of contention. What the critics worry about is a naive adherence to technological advancement in a time when technology is chiefly wielded by an undemocratic, unelected minority of god-kings whose grand...