When Values Faded
There’s a particular kind of quiet shock that happens when you read old futurism.
Not the charming shock of “they predicted video calls,” or the museum-like thrill of antique inventions drawn with loving detail. I mean the deeper, more unsettling recognition: the future was imagined with extraordinary technical confidence and almost no moral weight.
Albert Robida’s La Vie électrique (1892) is one of those books. It’s exuberant, clever, and—by any reasonable standard—astonishingly prescient. He imagines an electrified world of mediated presence, remote spectacle, instant communication, automated comfort. In other words: a world that looks uncannily like ours.
And yet what lingers after the prediction-magic wears off is something else entirely. A hollow space where you expected grown-up questions to live.
Not “Can we build it?” but “Should we?”
Not “What will it do?” but “Who will it do it to?”
Not “How efficient is it?” but “What will it make of us?”
That hollow space is the real prophecy.
The Old Dream? Progress Without a Shadow
Robida’s optimism isn’t a personal flaw; it’s a cultural mood. Late 19th-century technological imagination was steeped in a kind of secular faith: the belief that power automatically becomes improvement. That if you increase capacity—speed, reach, connectivity—you increase goodness by default.
Electricity, in Robida’s hands, becomes more than a tool. It becomes an organizing principle of civilization: the invisible current that will lighten labor, dissolve distance, refine culture, and elevate the everyday.
It’s beautiful. It’s seductive. It’s also missing something fundamental: the shadow that follows every new capability.
Today, we’re living in the afterimage of that dream. We swapped electricity for AI, telegraphy for platforms, the téléphonoscope for smartphones and streaming, but the underlying emotional logic often remains unchanged:
If we can scale it, it must be progress.
And that logic, applied long enough, produces a distinctive kind of moral erosion—subtle, cumulative, and easy to deny.
The New Machines? Same Blind Spot
What Robida couldn’t see—what his era didn’t train itself to see—were the hidden architectures around technology: power, incentives, surveillance, and the way systems shape people long before people consciously choose anything.
His imagined media devices aren’t engines of manipulation; they’re windows. His networks don’t alter public life; they enrich it. His automation reduces drudgery; it doesn’t reorganize society.
Our reality, of course, is messier.
Connectivity didn’t only connect. It also enabled new kinds of control.
Automation didn’t only free. It also redistributed insecurity.
Media didn’t only inform. It also industrialized attention.
The point is not that Robida was naïve. The point is that naïvety is durable. It migrates. It reincarnates in new forms, wearing the latest hardware like a fashionable coat.
We like to think we’ve outgrown the 19th century. But we keep reenacting its core mistake: treating technological change as a moral argument in itself.
Emancipation? Decorative Then, Performative Now
If there’s a place where old futurism reveals its deepest limits, it’s emancipation.
Robida sometimes imagines women more present in public life. There are hints of modernity, gestures toward participation. But the frame remains stubbornly paternal. The changes feel aesthetic rather than structural—more like a costume change than a shift in who holds power.
That’s uncomfortable to recognize because we can find modern equivalents everywhere.
Today we can be fluent in inclusion while leaving power untouched. We can celebrate visibility while preserving concentration of control. We can translate emancipation into branding—clean, shareable, and safely unthreatening.
When emancipation is reduced to symbols, it becomes decorative.
When it’s reduced to metrics, it becomes performative.
In both cases, it avoids the one thing real emancipation demands: a redistribution of agency.
Robida’s future flatters itself. So does ours.
Ethics as an Afterthought
What’s missing in Robida is what’s missing in so much contemporary innovation culture: the sense that technology is never merely technical.
There is no pure tool. Every tool is embedded in incentives, institutions, and human desires. Every new capacity creates new vulnerabilities. Every convenience carries a cost that usually arrives somewhere else: in privacy, in attention, in environment, in community, in the interior life.
And yet, culturally, we often treat ethics like a cosmetic layer you can apply after launch—a press release, a set of principles, a committee, a pledge.
But ethics isn’t a patch. It’s the foundation. Without it, systems optimize for what they can measure, and what they can measure is rarely what matters most.
Efficiency is measurable.
Profit is measurable.
Engagement is measurable.
Dignity isn’t.
Wisdom isn’t.
The long-term health of a society isn’t.
So the measurable wins by default—not because anyone explicitly chooses cruelty, but because culture allows the wrong scoreboard to define success.
This is how values fade: not with a bang, but with dashboards.
The Real Problem Isn’t Technical
The temptation is to say we need better regulation, better design, better safety standards. We do. But the deeper issue is cultural maturity.
Our technical intelligence is extraordinary. Our moral imagination—our ability to think seriously about consequences, power, and responsibility—often lags behind. Not because individuals are stupid, but because the culture of innovation rewards speed over reflection, novelty over duty, scale over care.
Technology grows exponentially.
Culture grows painfully, politically, slowly.
That mismatch creates the feeling many people have today: a kind of vertigo, a sense that we’re being carried forward by systems we didn’t truly consent to and cannot meaningfully steer.
We are not short on knowledge.
We are short on wisdom.
What Robida Still Teaches Us
The most haunting thing about La Vie électrique is not how much it gets right. It’s how effortlessly it ignores the questions we now know are unavoidable.
Who controls the networks?
What happens when attention becomes an industry?
What does constant mediation do to human intimacy?
How does convenience reshape character?
What does progress cost the planet?
What happens when power hides behind “neutral” tools?
Robida’s silence on these issues is a mirror held up to our own. Because even now—after a century of wars, mass media, surveillance states, environmental crises, and algorithmic life—we still behave as though capability is virtue.
When values fade, technology doesn’t become evil. It becomes indifferent. And indifference, scaled, can look a lot like destiny.
A Different Kind of Future
The challenge isn’t to stop building. It’s to build like adults.
To treat ethics not as restraint but as orientation.
To treat emancipation not as imagery but as power.
To treat progress not as speed but as responsibility.
A truly modern future would be one where our tools grow, yes—but where our moral vocabulary grows with them. Where we stop confusing “new” with “better.” Where we stop outsourcing judgment to systems that cannot carry it.
Because if we don’t, we’ll keep repeating the same story in different costumes:
Bright machines.
Faded values.
And the strangest part will be this: we’ll call it innovation.
Illustration of the essay
The image depicts seduction and emptiness at the same time: technological brilliance on the outside, moral decay on the inside. It goes for a symbolic, timeless image (without recognizable people), with a strong visual contrast.
This image captures exactly the tension at the heart of our essay. It is almost painfully honest because it presents beauty and elevation while quietly revealing fracture beneath. The floating, radiant city-body evokes technological promise, transcendence, and light, yet it is literally detached from the ground that sustains it. Beneath it, the cracked earth speaks of cultural erosion, ecological wear, and moral fatigue … progress that no longer lands.
The weathered classical sculpture embodies values as something admired but inert: a monument to morality that is present yet powerless. Human silhouettes with glowing devices appear connected yet disembodied, holding light in their hands while their figures remain in darkness.
This is not an overt dystopia, which is what makes its quiet hypocrisy so sharp. Everything looks beautiful, clean, and futuristic while the foundations are already failing. The image visually expresses what When Values Fadeddoes intellectually: technology ascends, values are left behind, and no one seems to find it strange. There is no tyrant, no explosion, no malevolent machine… only indifference at scale.
