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In 2016, Dmitri Orlov, the Soviet-born engineer who chronicled the collapse of the USSR from the inside published Shrinking the Technosphere, a how-to manual for regaining human autonomy from runaway technology. As Dmitri revealed in this interview, the book bombed. Readers who picked it up expecting a tidy virtue signaling primer on tech ethics, got introduced to the likes of Ted Kaczynski instead. Well, as the song from the 1970s by Rick Nelson goes, “if you can’t please everyone, well you’re gonna have to please yourself.”
Ten years on, I invited Dmitry back onto the IfSPP podcast to “reminisce” about his time writing the book and how he thinks the world performed in the ensuing years. Spoiler alert, it’s looking like the “technosphere,” his term for the self-interested, self-propagating network of technology that increasingly sets its own agenda is now bigger, faster, and more fractured than ever.
It was a far reaching conversation and we covered a lot of areas to include:
- Defining the technosphere vs. the biosphere
- AI: useful tool or dangerous crutch?
- Autonomous weapons and the loss of conscience
- The offshoring parallel: America’s disposable-engineer culture
- DeepSeek and the case for investing in domestic talent
- Vocational education, mentorship, and the “just be a welder” contradiction
- The Amish/Hutterite model of controlled technology
- Orlov’s own de-teching: Linux, no Microsoft, a Russian Army van
- A world splitting into separate technospheres
Dmitry now publishes weekly on Boosty and he can be found at: https://boosty.to/cluborlov
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