I'm Tired of Pretending Tech is Making the World Better
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My phone struggled to load the site to order a single cold brew, pop-ups to install the custom App kept obscuring the options, and I had to register with my phone number, email address, and first and last name to buy a $5 cup of coffee.
Then walk out. Don't reward the bullshit with your money. The coffee shop ain't gonna give a shit if you keep buying coffee just to go home and complain on your blog.
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I'm tired of people saying "technology" when they mean an application of a narrow subfield of technology. Quite often, they're not even talking about the tech at all, but instead the practices, leadership, or stock market performance of some corporation that happens to use or produce such a thing in the course of its business.
I do share the sentiment in this article, though. There's way too much stuff that we don't need being pushed upon us in order to extract wealth or power.
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For the past 20 years, tech has promised to make things more efficient while making almost everything more complicated and less meaningful. Innovation, for innovation's sake, has eroded our craftsmanship, relationships, and ability to think critically.
I feel this in my bones.
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Technology and progress were at one time closer to synonymous but those definitions have forked widely. It's important to identify what is a development that brings value and pushes progress and what is a use of technology that punishes us, controls us, or simply makes life more complicated. The vast majority of technology now falls into these categories.
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Something, something, the industrial revolution and its consequences...
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Technology has started to make it easier and easier to be anti consumer. To maximise how much you can extract out of consumers.
It is making it easier to understand and control exactly how they use products and services. This allows you to structure your price and offering to give them the minimum amount they'll accept at the maximum price. Allows you to strip features out and offer them for extra. Allows you to hide things behind ongoing subscriptions. Allows you to better lock people into products and services, making it more difficult to switch/leave.
All of this was possible (and being done) before, but technology makes this so much easier/better.
Technologies often start out by making something easier for the consumer. But beyond the early stages, it's all about making the world better - for the corporations developing and selling products and services.
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Tech was ruined in the 90s when capitalistic influences (microsoft being the dominant force but far from the only one) propagandized the industry and eventually populace at large with the idea that competition in the industry is what drives innovation.
Granted, much of their work was already done for them thanks to western influence perpetuating this ideal for ages. But when the frameworks for open standards, interoperability, and collaborative development were being proposed and put into place they were shot down and/or actively sabotaged
As a result 40 years later we have this mess. A landscape filled with nightmare tech. Fragmentation everywhere, design heavily influenced by a small handful of sociopaths with no empathy and active disdain for users, the idea of open standards is something that requires government intervention (and still rarely occurs), interoperability is something that has to be hacked around and frequently breaks as a means to encourage purchasing a competing product.
What could have been. Tech designed for people’s needs rather than tech designed to extract income
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Atomic bombs are also tools with no moral compass of their own.
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I think when most people say something like “technology is making the world worse” they mean the technology as it actually exists and as it is actually developing, not the abstract sense of possible futures that technology could feasibly deliver.
That is clearly what the author of the piece meant.
If the main focus of people who develop most technology is getting people more addicted to their devices so they are easier to exploit the. Technology sucks. If the main focus is to generate immoral levels of waste to scam venture capitalists and idiots on the internet then technology sucks. If the main focus is to use technology to monetize every aspect of someone’s existence, then I think it is fair to say that technology, at this point in history, sucks.
Saying “technology is neutral” is not super insightful if, in the present moment, the trend in technological development and its central applications are mostly evil.
Saying “technology is neutral” is worse than unhelpful if, in the present moment, the people who want to use technology to harm others are also using that cliche to justify their antisocial behavior.
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The original use of what we now think of as a "spoon" originally had nothing to do with food.
1000 years ago they would chain slaves neck to neck. They'd use the spoon to carve out everybodies eyes except the first guy in the line. Slaves don't need to see. They just need to carry heavy shit. The first slave can see. The rest just need to go where their neck drags them.
I say all this to agree with you. Technology isn't the source of corruption and evil. It is just a tool. Just like a spoon. I use my spoon to eat cereal. Others use the spoon to carve out peoples eyes. The spoon is not evil. The spoon is a tool.
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Yeah, just watch what AI does. The generation after Gen Alpha is going to be unable to imagine the concept of being self sustaining, and problem solving without machines. The same way Gen Z today can't imagine the concept of just NOT having internet. Or any internet connected devices.
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Tech was ruined in the 90s
40 years later
Pick one. I'm 41 and was born in 1983.
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This feels super duper made up
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tbf, the past few years have felt like decades
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Tech has made things more efficient - the rewards of such are simply being funneled from the average person to the wealthy.
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Fentanyl is a technology.
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For many things I completely agree.
That said, we just had our second kid, and neither set of grandparents live locally. That we can video chat with our family --- for free, essentially! --- is astonishing. And it's not a big deal, not something we plan, just, "hey let's say hi to Gramma and Gramps!"
When I was a kid videoconferencing was exclusive to seriously high end offices. And when we wanted to make a long distance call, we'd sometimes plan it in advance and buy prepaid minutes (this is on a landline, mid 90s maybe). Now my mom can just chat with her friend "across the pond" whenever she wants, from the comfort of her couch, and for zero incremental cost.
I think technology that "feels like tech" is oftentimes a time sink and a waste. But the tech we take for granted? There's some pretty amazing stuff there.
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in my opinion, at this point of history, FAST is inherently detrimental. Only those with privilege and resources are able to adapt to rapid changes and reap their benefits, while the rest are left behind.
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I like the way you argument but I'm not able to grasp what you try to say entirely. English isn't my native language, this may play into it.
Technology is constrained by the rules of the physical world, but that is an underconstraint.
I. e this sentence.:) Would you rephrase it and give an additional example?
I kind of get the mass transit vs. cars example. Although I think both options have their advantages and disadvantages. It becomes very apparent to me when... Lets say, when you give everyone a car and send them all together into rush hour and transform our cities into something well suited for cars but not so much for people. But that doesn't make the wheel or the engine evil in itself.
Also: The society and and it's values affects technology which in turn affects the environment the society lives in. Yes, I get that when I think i.e. about the industrialisation in the 19th century.
I struggle with the idea that a tool (like a computer) is bad because is too general purpose. Society hence the people and their values define how the tool is used. Would you elaborate on that? I'd like to understand the idea.
