Five Questions to Unmask Any ‘Progress’ Story

Learning how to spot propaganda is not really about catching liars. Most of the time nobody is lying to you. The trick is subtler than that: a claim arrives already dressed as progress, and the word does the work a lie would otherwise have to. “Progress” is a word that ends arguments. Say a new technology is progress and you have quietly won before anyone has asked the only question that matters — progress toward what, and for whom? That is the sleight of hand I want to take apart here, because propaganda dressed as progress is the most persuasive kind. It doesn’t ask you to believe something false. It asks you to stop asking.

I’ve spent a long time watching the same pattern repeat across centuries of new machines, and the pattern is always the same in one respect: progress is never neutral. Every technology moves benefits toward some people and costs toward others. It makes certain things abundant and, in doing so, makes someone’s old abundance worthless. The word “progress” hides that distribution question by folding a thousand different outcomes into one shining direction. So I’ve learned to carry five questions with me — a small diagnostic I run on any story about a new tool before I let it end the argument in my head. They are not clever. They are just stubborn. And stubborn is what you need when a word is doing your thinking for you.

1. Who benefits, and who bears the cost?

This is the first question because it is the one the word “progress” is built to suppress. Every genuine advance has a ledger. Someone gains time, money, power, or convenience. Someone else pays — in lost work, lost bargaining power, lost autonomy, or simply in being the one who now adapts while others are spared. When a claim is presented as good for everyone, that is usually the moment to look hardest, because “everyone” is where the losers get hidden.

Take ride-hailing apps. The story was frictionless convenience: a car in three minutes, no haggling, a rating system that keeps everyone honest. All true for the passenger. But run the ledger and you find the cost didn’t vanish, it moved. The driver absorbed the risk that used to sit with a company — the vehicle, the insurance, the empty hours between fares, the algorithm that can deactivate them without appeal. The convenience was real. It was also paid for by someone who wasn’t in the advertisement. When you ask who bears the cost, you are not being cynical. You are just refusing to accept a ledger with only one column filled in.

“Everyone benefits” is where the losers get hidden. A ledger with only one column filled in is not an accounting — it is an advertisement.

2. What’s being made abundant, and whose scarcity was it?

Technologies work by turning something scarce into something cheap. That is genuinely how they create value — and it’s also where you find who loses. Because someone was living on that scarcity. Their income, their status, their leverage all depended on the thing being hard, rare, or expensive. Make it abundant and you have not just created a benefit; you have dismantled someone’s livelihood on purpose. Usually a livelihood that had no say in the matter.

When printing made text abundant, the scarcity it destroyed belonged to the scribes and the institutions that controlled who could copy a book. When recorded music made performance abundant, it hollowed out the working musician who used to be the only way to hear a song in your town. Ask the question about any current claim and it sharpens fast. AI makes competent writing, code, and images abundant — so whose scarcity was that? It was the scarcity that let a mid-level illustrator, a junior copywriter, a jobbing translator charge for their time. Naming the scarcity that’s being dissolved tells you exactly who is about to be told, cheerfully, that they are on the wrong side of progress. I’ve written more about this dynamic in is my job safe from AI — the question is rarely “can the machine do it” but “whose scarcity paid your salary.”

3. Is “inevitability” being used to shut down debate — and who benefits from that framing?

Watch for the word “inevitable.” It is the single most useful tell in the whole business. When someone tells you a technology is coming whether you like it or not, that resistance is futile, that you can either get on board or get left behind — they are not describing the future. They are trying to build it. Inevitability is a rhetorical move, not a forecast. Its whole function is to convert a political choice, one that could go several ways, into a natural fact you are foolish to argue with.

And it pays to ask who gains from that framing. Because the future is not fixed. It is being decided right now — in what gets funded, what gets regulated, what gets normalised, what gets resisted. The people who most want you to believe the outcome is settled are almost always the people who would lose if it were actually put to a vote. “Inevitable” is how you get someone to stop voting. Whenever a claim leans hard on the idea that there’s no point debating, notice that the not-debating is itself the thing being sold to you. A future that were truly inevitable would not need such a large marketing budget to convince you it’s coming.

4. Who owns the tool, and who sets its rules?

A technology is never just a capability floating free in the world. It is owned. It runs on infrastructure someone controls, under rules someone writes, and those rules can change the day the owner decides. So the interesting question is never only “what can this tool do” but “who holds the switch.” Two identical capabilities can mean freedom or subjection depending entirely on who owns the thing and who gets to set its terms.

Consider the difference between a tool you run yourself and a service you rent. A calculator you own does the same thing every day for the rest of its life; nobody can reach into it and change the price, harvest what you type, or switch it off. A cloud service that does the “same” arithmetic can raise its rates, alter its terms, mine your usage, and revoke your access at will. The capability looks identical. The power arrangement is the opposite. This is why ownership is a question you have to ask separately — the shininess of what a tool does tells you nothing about who it ultimately serves. I dug into this at length in who owns AI, because with this generation of technology the ownership is astonishingly concentrated, and concentrated ownership is how a tool that could liberate a great many people ends up disciplining them instead.

The shininess of what a tool does tells you nothing about who it serves. Ask separately who holds the switch — because they can change the rules the day they choose.

5. What’s being quietly enclosed — and who’s dispossessed?

The last question is the oldest and the least visible. Over and over, new technology becomes the means to take something that was shared or commonly held and put a fence around it. The enclosure is rarely announced. It happens in the fine print, in the default settings, in the terms of service nobody reads — and by the time anyone notices, the thing that used to be common is now owned, and the people who relied on it have been quietly dispossessed. That is the deepest capture pattern of all, and it almost never wears the costume of theft. It wears the costume of a free service.

Think about how much of ordinary human life has been fenced this way. The open web — a genuine commons — got funnelled into a handful of platforms that now sit between you and everyone you know, charging rent in attention and data. Your face, your voice, your writing, the trail of everywhere you’ve been: things that were simply yours, gathered up and turned into someone’s proprietary training set or ad-targeting asset. When you ask what is being quietly enclosed, you learn to see the fence going up before it’s finished. And the tell is always the same — something that was free to everyone becomes, without any moment you could point to as the theft, something you now access only on someone else’s terms. Whoever was dispossessed rarely got a vote, and often didn’t even get a notification.

Running the five questions together

None of these questions is meant to make you a cynic who assumes every new thing is a con. That would be its own kind of failure to think. The point is the opposite: to let you tell the difference between technologies that genuinely spread benefit and those that concentrate it while wearing the language of the former. You run the five and the shape of a claim resolves. Who benefits and who pays. What’s made abundant and whose scarcity dies. Whether inevitability is doing the arguing. Who owns the switch. What’s being fenced. Ask them in sequence and the single word “progress” comes apart into the several very different things it was covering for.

You’ll notice the questions rhyme with each other, and that’s not an accident. They are five angles on one underlying thing — the capture pattern, the way a genuine advance gets captured by whoever is positioned to own it, so that the gains flow uphill while the story flows to everyone. It’s worth understanding that pattern directly, which is why I traced it in how technology gets captured. And it’s worth resisting the lazy pessimism that says capture is guaranteed. It isn’t. A technology can create work as well as destroy it, distribute power as well as hoard it — I looked at exactly that possibility in will AI create jobs. Which way it goes is not written in the machine. It’s written in the answers to these five questions, and those answers are still being decided.

The reframe

Here is what the whole diagnostic finally comes down to. “Progress” describes a direction, not a destination, and certainly not who the journey is good for. A train moving fast is making progress toward its stop whether you happen to be on it, standing on the platform, or lying across the tracks. The word tells you there is motion. It tells you nothing about your position relative to that motion — and that missing part, your position, is the entire thing that matters. The genius of the word, the reason it ends arguments, is precisely that it deletes the question of position and leaves only the reassuring fact of movement.

So these five questions are not a way to be against things. They are a way to recover the part the word hides. Every time you hear that something is progress, you now have a way to finish the sentence the marketing left off: progress toward what, made abundant at whose expense, sold as inevitable by whom, owned by whom, fencing off what. Answer those, and you are no longer being carried by the word. You are the one deciding whether the direction it names is one you actually want to go. That is what it means to spot propaganda dressed as progress — not to reject the future, but to insist, every single time, on knowing whose future it is.