A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

What's more tragic about it is that it has increasingly little to do with merit or hard work and increasingly more to do with dumb luck. It's all social networking; but that's totally random. People are only selecting friends and partners based on capital these days, not based on any other meaningful characteristic. People are just appendages to the capital... Capital is the agent. People are replaceable.

You can thank the reserve banks for that.

The promise of tech was that we could bend it to our will to do what we want. Instead, over the last decade, we have aimed these tools at ourselves in order for companies to extract as much value from humans as possible. Then again, maybe that was the thing we were trying to do all along anyway.

But I find myself here in 2021, 15 years into an engineering career, looking at the amount of effort I have to spend just to get my devices to work for me and not let my life be absorbed by whatever company I decide to interact with.

I have to lock down my browsers, run pi-hole and out-bound application firewalls, use email forwarding services to mask my address, check my credit reports on a regular basis because a dozen of the services I have used have been breached. Change and manage passwords and TOTP tokens. I have to opt-out of mailing lists, set up burner accounts, answer phone calls as to why I tried to place an order online behind a VPN and how that was suspicious and my order is being cancelled. My car is on its last legs and I cringe at the prospect of even looking at a newer model-year vehicle, because it will almost certainly be connected to the internet and try and extract as much information about me, and the devices I interface with it, to be sold to who knows where.

What was wrong purchasing media and curating your own collection? How did we get from "Rip. Mix. Burn" to "Spotify wins patent to surveil users’ emotions to recommend music"? Why does my HP printer require an account to scan documents locally? Why does my f*king Philips S7000 razor need a smartphone app to change its sensitivity settings? Why does my goddamn fridge have an operating system?

Was it worth it? It seems the thing technology helps me do the most these days is avoid all the terrible things about technology.

I assumed "for example" follows a collection/set as opposed to "that is" which is a 1-1 mapping. Sibling comment clarified it for me on why "for example" makes sense in this context.

QAnon has no platform available. Hell, maybe we still have blogs but you aren't plastered echo-chamber friendly messages you have to actually search for stuff to read or maybe go to a phpbb forum.

Trump without Twitter, QAnon, 4Chan would've probably played out differently. Without a way for society to constantly feed his narcissism would he have been so anti-mask - would anti-science even be so big if there weren't echo-chambers re-inforcing this?

That's just social media itself. It's literally poisoned our society as much as a social credit score in China probably has there among relationships. Piss someone off and now you're an enemy combatant and can't travel.

I think tech can also fix a lot, but it depends how we use it and what we do with it. I hope we can science our way out of Global Warming but I'm not very optimistic about us surviving into 2100s.