Technological progress now harms more than helps.

21 March 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

The U.S. itself provides an excellent example of this — that the reality is that in the hands of the powerful (which is usually the case), technology produces vastly more harms against, rather than than goods for, the public:

@middleeasteye

Middle East Eye on Instagram: "“American sanctions from 1971 to…

3 March 2026, John Mearsheimer

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As I said to you before, I think that we are an incredibly ruthless country.

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The amount of murder and mayhem that we’ve created around the world is just unbelievable.

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You know, I was looking at a study the other day put out by Lancet, which is a scientific journal,

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and they did a study.

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This was put out, you can see it on the internet, it was put out in November of 2025.

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And what the article did was it looked at sanctions, American sanctions, from 1971 to 2021.

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And it asked what were the consequences of those sanctions, and we murdered 38 million people.

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38 million people.

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The amount of havoc we have wrought on the Middle East in recent years is just stunning.

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If you think about the consequences of the Iraq War, what we do in places like Venezuela, Cuba, Iran,

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you understand we’re using this tremendous economic leverage we have to basically starve people,

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to make them suffer, to inflict great punishment on them, so that they’ll rise up against their government.

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You understand that this is what we’re doing in Venezuela, this is what we’re doing in Iran.

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We’re inflicting massive punishment on these people.

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Given all that, I find it very difficult to talk about the United States as a noble country.

[It certainly is NOT “a noble country”; it has, indeed, become the exact opposite. The Lancet article said: “We estimate that unilateral sanctions over this period caused 564 258 (95% CI 367 838–760 677) deaths per year. This estimate corresponds to incremental annual deaths of 0·02% of the population (95% CI 0·01–0·03), which is equivalent to 3·6% (2·3–4·8) of total deaths observed in sanctioned countries. This estimate is higher than the average annual number of battle-related casualties during this period (106 000 deaths per year) and similar to some estimates of the total death toll of wars including civilian casualties (around half a million deaths per year).14” So: totaling both sanctions and outright military operations, the U.S. Government has caused or contributed to causing premature deaths amounting to approximately 7% of all deaths in the countries that the U.S. Government has been trying to conquer or control. The U.S. Government is the only existing imperial nation in the world today, and had, as-of 2022, 900 foreign military bases. This empire dwarfs all in world history, and is made possible ONLY by high-technology means, not just in weapons-production, but ALSO in propaganda, finance, and everything else. That is why it is by far the largest empire in history.]

Gallup’s World Happiness Report 2026 also provides a number of examples of this — technology’s harmfulness — such as its Chapter 3, which they summarize:

Social media is harming adolescents at a scale large enough to cause changes at the population level:

• Is social media use reasonably safe for children and adolescents? We call this the “product safety question”, and we present seven lines of evidence showing that the answer is no.

• The evidence of harm is found in: 1) surveys of young people; 2) surveys of parents, teachers, and clinicians; 3) contents from corporate documents; 4) findings from cross-sectional studies; 5) findings from longitudinal studies; 6) findings from social media reduction experiments; and 7) findings from natural experiments.

• We show there is now overwhelming evidence of severe and widespread direct harms (such as cyberbullying and sextortion), and compelling evidence of troubling indirect harms (such as depression). Furthermore, we show that the harms and risks to individual users are so diverse and vast in scope that they justify the view that social media is causing harm at a population level.

• We further argue that when these lines of evidence are considered alongside the timing, scope, and cross-national trends in adolescent wellbeing and mental health, they can help answer a second question: was the rapid adoption of always-available social media by adolescents in the early 2010s a substantial contributor to the population-level increases in mental illness that emerged by the mid 2010s in many Western nations? We call this the “historical trends question”. We draw on our findings about the vast scale of harm uncovered while answering the product safety question to argue that the answer to the historical trends question is “yes”.

The harms aren’t ONLY to young people. In the summaries of other chapters are the following:

Life satisfaction is highest at low rates of social media use and lower at higher rates of use.

Social media, gaming, and browsing for fun are associated with lower life evaluations.

• All internet activities are associated with lower life satisfaction at very high rates of use, especially for girls and for those in the UK and Ireland, the two English-speaking countries in PISA.

• Data from Latin America reveal that the type of platform is crucial. Platforms designed to facilitate social connections show a clear positive association with happiness, whereas those driven by algorithmically curated content tend to demonstrate a negative association at high rates of use. …

Three empirical studies raise serious doubts about whether social media use makes people happy, with implications for valuation, choice, and wellbeing. The central conclusion is that many people use social media because other people use social media. If social media use were somehow reduced or even stopped, many people would be better off, and they are aware of that fact. …

• For adolescents, Problematic Social Media Use (PSMU) is associated with more psychological complaints and lower life evaluation in all 43 countries we examined. These associations are most pronounced in Anglo-Celtic countries and least problematic in the Caucasus-Black Sea region.

• Globally, the relationship between PSMU and lower wellbeing is stronger among adolescents from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than among their higher-status peers. …

• Between 2018 and 2022, the negative association between PSMU and adolescent wellbeing intensified. This increase occurred across all socioeconomic groups and in most of the regions examined. …

• The estimated relationship between internet use and wellbeing varies sharply across generations, genders, and regions. It is strongly negative for Gen Z, moderately negative for Millennials, near zero for Gen X, and slightly positive for Baby Boomers. The generational gradient reflects both greater increases in internet use among younger cohorts (exposure) and more negative estimated coefficients for those same cohorts (susceptibility).

• The social and emotional foundations of wellbeing have deteriorated most for younger Europeans, especially in Western Europe. Declines in interpersonal trust, institutional trust, perceived social activity, and social meeting frequency are largest for Gen Z and Millennial women. In contrast, older cohorts show more resilience, supported by rising attachment to country and, in many Central and Eastern European countries, improved feelings of safety.

• Perceived social activity (“compared to others your age”) has fallen everywhere and is among the strongest predictors of wellbeing losses. …

On average, heavy social media use (more than five hours per day) is associated with lower wellbeing. Heavy users are significantly more likely to report higher stress and depressive symptoms, and believe they are worse off than their parents, compared with non- or moderate users.

Other than that, the biggest harms of all are obviously caused by weapons, which are designed to create death, injury, and destruction. (Gallup ignores the military.) And now weapons are being made increasingly effective by high-technologies. We are currently heading toward World War Three (the likely culmination of the war by the U.S. empire to conquer ultimately the entire rest of the world — starting, of course, with Venezuela, Iran, China, Russia, and North Korea), which would be incomparably worse than all previous wars in history were (and would, due to the final nuclear phase of WW3, kill-off at least half of the human population within just the first two years from the nuclear blasts).

So, whereas science per-se is good, humans (it is, by now, obvious) are so psychopathic that this species will do more harm than good by applying science to develop technologies further than had been the case before the industrial revolution in and since around the year 1800 (which was around when things started downhill). Of course, the U.S. Government now is trying to add Iran to its empire or else destroy it entirely, and this is a warning for all countries that aren’t yet colonies of America, of what could happen to them if they continue to resist. The entire world should be boycotting U.S. brands and especially U.S. high-tech — abandoning it altogether (thus cutting off at the source the megadonors who now virtually own all U.S. Presidents and congress-persons) — but that’s not happening, which is a bad sign for where things are heading. Why should not “made anywhere but inside the U.S. empire” become a slogan of public contempt against the empire’s products and the billionaires who profit from them? Everyone except the world’s billionaires who benefit greatly from the empire, would benefit from such a policy against them. And those billionaires have the power, by virtue of their propaganda, to prevent this from happening. That’s the problem.

This is not to say, nor imply, that ONLY the U.S. Government is so hyper-psychopathic, but it refers instead to the ENTIRE American empire being so. For example, Israel is even more blatantly psychopathic than America is. And, according to U.S. News & World Report, Israel (a country of only 10 million population) has the world’s 2nd-strongest military, which is even stronger than America’s is (and Israel’s is overwhelmingly funded by America). Fortunately for the entire world, Russia is ranked there as the world’s #1 military, and China is #4; so, America would need to be led by an incredibly stupid psychopath for there to be a WW3. But that IS the danger, and advances in technology are increasing its harms — as the peoples in today’s Middle East are now experiencing (and the rest of the world will likely soon be experiencing).

High technology is itself the biggest weapon that the empire wields; and this comes ultimately at the expense of everyone else. Unaccountable power, such as this, produces what is perhaps now the world’s most corrupt country, as is exemplified in the following:

Instagram

☢️☢️☢️☢️☢️ #denver #rockyflats #Colorado #coverup #corruption. Sources include: Westword 9.30.1992 “Justice Denied: The Secret Story of the Rocky Flats Grand Jury” Washington Post 8.11.1993 “Free the Rocky Flats 23” Colorado Public Radio 1.5.2017 “Rocky Flats and Cancer: 24 Years of Data Inconclusive on Possible Links” Colorado Sun 8.10.2025 “Open Space vs. Safety: The Debate Goes Nuclear at Rocky Flats” Denver7 1.28.2026 “Warning Signs Going Up at Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge Warning of Possible Radioactive Contamination”:

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Fifteen miles from Denver, a nuclear weapons plant operated in secret for 40 years.

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Its contamination was hidden from every community downwind.

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Rocky Flats produced 70,000 plutonium bomb triggers.

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Workers were forbidden to speak about it.

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Neighbors were never told.

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Fires in 1957 and 1969 spread radioactive contamination across Denver suburbs.

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Officials said the air filters held.

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They had not.

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3,000 barrels of nuclear waste corroded in open fields for 11 years,

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leaking plutonium into the groundwater of Broomfield and Westminster.

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In 1989, the FBI and EPA raided Rocky Flats,

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a federal facility owned and operated by the Department of Energy.

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A grand jury heard over 100 witnesses,

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reviewed thousands of exhibits,

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and voted to indict eight people,

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including Department of Energy officials.

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Attorney General Richard Thornburgh owned Rockwell International’s stock,

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a conflict he never disclosed.

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The Justice Department killed every indictment.

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Rockwell’s fine was less than their own bonuses.

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Not one person charged,

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jurors threatened with prison.

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The evidence files?

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Gone.

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Today, the site is the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge.

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Public hiking trails on a plateau where plutonium still exceeds cleanup standards.

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When inhaled, plutonium lodges in the lungs,

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enters the bloodstream,

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and settles in the bones and liver,

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irradiating tissue from inside for decades.

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Nobody went to prison.

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The agency that ran the cover-up still manages the cleanup.

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4,000 new homes are going up one mile from ground zero.

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Plutonium 239 has a half-life of 24,000 years.

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The government decided that that was acceptable,

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without ever asking the people who would live there.

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The contamination didn’t go anywhere.

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The people just moved closer to it.

[If you want to know more about this case, here is a blockbuster 56-minute investigative report on it by PBS FRONTLINE, which makes clear that a permanent Deep State controls the U.S. Government; and here and here are follow-ups about President Bill Clinton, after he came into office after Reagan and Bush had done all they could to squelch any accountability on this matter; then, as the President, Clinton quickly ended the matter by total non-accountability (except against the grand jurors and the direct victims taking all the losses from it), and Clinton refused to respond to press questions about the matter. A more consistently corrupt government than this is hard to even imagine, and so anyone who would call a Government such as this a “democracy” is either a fool or a liar.]

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MY CONCLUSION:

Ever-increasingly, high technology is serving the few powerful, at the expense of the many powerless. This is the reason why technological progress now harms more than helps. On 15 September 2022, Gallup headlined “The Global Rise of Unhappiness” and presented their graph of unhappiness as measured on the first day of every year, rising from 24% in 2011, to 33% in the latest, 2021, and it was rather steadily rising throughout that time, except declining 2% during 2013. They said, “Anger, stress, sadness, physical pain and worry reach a new global high. Index scores range from zero to 100.” Then, on 13 October 2025, they headlined “Tracking the World’s Emotional Health: Negative emotions remain elevated, with implications for global peace and health”, and reported that ever since 2021, it had basically flatlined — at that record-high level.

The argument here is not against science, but it is against modern technologies, because ever-increasingly they are serving the few billionaires who profit from them, at the expense of the safety, welfare, and happiness, of the public. This system — which they call “capitalism” but is now actually the fascist form of that — takes from the many powerless, and transfers that to the extremely few powerful. The billionaires benefit, which is why they won’t willingly give up their power. It’s interesting that the sharp rise started in 2011 during the Presidency of the liberal fascist Barack Obama, and has continued since that time, now under the conservative fascist (like Hitler and Mussolini were), Donald Trump.

The argument here is to obstruct technological development inside the empire, and to expedite it outside the empire, so that workers and consumers will benefit more, and mega-investors — who control the armaments-manufacturers which sell to the Government inside the empire — will see their markets shrink. The best way to do this would be to BDS U.S.A., or at least to boycott it. Of course, no one will boycott all U.S. brands, but only the ones they can easily replace, and that might be enough to do the trick. The U.S. is the head of the imperial body, and this would aim against the head — not against the body (which are only the empire’s colonies).

It would hit the billionaires in my country, America, but would benefit the entire world — which includes the publics everywhere. There is massive evidence that this is needed.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.