Things get worse when computers arrive. Engineering gets worse, writing gets worse, transportation gets worse, music gets worse, cinema gets worse, sex gets worse, philosophy gets worse, politics gets worse, families get worse, TV gets worse.
When computers arrive, a new normal arrives with them, and we all eventually accept it. Computers on our desks, in our pockets, eventually in our brains. It's always necessary to create a new semiotic system to make it okay, to make the automation of the soul and its creations a positive good.
Liberalism has become reactionary because during the 1990s and 2000s it assumed it had won and that it wouldn't be challenged again.
So, when it was challenged, again, liberalism found itself weak, lax—found that it had let down its defenses; so it took up arms hastily, unprepared, violent, unused to turbulence, terrified of the return of History.
One of the most prophetic, maybe the most prophetic voice of the mid-20th century was B.F. Skinner—not because everyone became conscious Skinnerians, but because the algorithmic world of the 21st century is inherently Skinnerian, behavioralist.