Three Ways Abstraction Defeats Social Change

Abstraction defeats social change in at least three ways.

1. Natasha Joshi shows the epistemological abstraction: lived understanding > quantifiable data > “impact metrics.”
The push to express care in market terms, losing what matters in the translation. We devalued what we couldn’t measure (Loss of quality).

2. Deepak Varuvel Dennison shows the knowledge abstraction:
embodied, local, oral wisdom > documented institutional knowledge > digitised corpus > AI training data.
Whole worlds of human understanding are simply absent. We digitised only what was dominant (Loss of diversity).

3. Jocelyn Skillman shows the relational abstraction:
village care > professional therapy > AI companion.
Each step trying to solve the scarcity created by the previous abstraction. We automated the empty shell that remained (Loss of humanity).

We’re at the point where LLMs trained on incomplete, abstracted knowledge are being used to deliver care that’s already been abstracted twice, measured by metrics that can’t capture what matters.

This is what late-stage abstraction looks like. We’ve repeatedly chosen abstraction over connection across every domain, building a technological future that’s systematically ignorant of most human wisdom and structurally incapable of providing what humans actually need.

The promise was abundance. Is the reality a hollow simulation?

Originally written for LinkedIn on 24 November 2025. View original →