The cognitive dissonance and total denial is off the charts with telecom and tech leaders who don't realize (or care) that their massive growth has played a large role in global civil unrest. The general public is terrified and angry at the rapidly shifting technological landscape and the changes in social norms that come with it. Trust in technology is at a low, and for good reason.
We have titanic businesses with almost superhuman like abilities to get under our skin at an algorithmic level. Tech companies can literally, for all intents and purposes, make people disappear from the internet. A small group of companies can casually destroy your life with a small code change and you wouldn't even know it. Everyone's data is being sold, stolen, sold on the black market, and intercepted by governments both local and foreign. An internet outage now means that your thermostat or fridge could go out and you're going to spend the night cold.
I mean, there's a reason that Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the most hyped games of the last 5 years. The anxiety resonates. Sometimes I wonder if there are people in tech/cable who grew up reading Neuromancer or Snow Crash and thought "Cool! Let's make it happen!"
The 2017 game Night In The Woods features this poem:
"There's No Reception in Possum Springs"
No reception here.
I wave my black phone
In the air like a flare
like a prayer,
but no reception.
I read on the Internet
baby face boy billionaire.
Phone app sold made more money in one day
than my family over 100 generations.
More than my whole world ever has.
World where house-buying jobs
became rent-paying jobs
became living with family jobs.
Boy billionaires.
Money is access;
access to politicians
waiting for us to die
lead in our water
alcohol and painkillers.
Replace my job with an app
replace my dreams of a house and a yard
with a couch in the basement.
"The future is yours!"
Forced 24-7 entrepreneurs.
I just want a paycheck and my own life.
I'm on the couch in the basement
they're in the house and the yard.
Some night I will catch a bus out to the west coast
And burn their silicon city to the ground.
I think Adam Segal's 2016 "The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age" often didn't go far enough to describe the role individuals could play in this…
> The cognitive dissonance and total denial is off the charts with telecom and tech leaders who don't realize (or care) that their massive growth has played a large role in global civil unrest.
I wouldn't leave out leaders in other industries as well: finance, energy, etc… TBTF/ TBTJ policies can incentivize this type of stuff as all other options to date seem to cause no effective changes.
100 percent true. No shortage of blame to go around and this is certainly not new either. We've just accelerated very fast during a year of deep suffering and this kind of thing is inevitable, sadly. I'm a firm believer in wielding antitrust law to break the biggest corpos up, no matter the sector.
I left the US 5 years ago… I think the US will be ground zero for this "Innovation" (although proof of concepts have been deployed in the ME for years, tech cheaper now for more people to use for their own ends)… :P
I don't think anywhere is completely safe, but I do think some places have less likelihood of such happening due to the backdrop not skewing incentives as much in those places for such to happen, but everywhere is connected…
Multiple places (Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Seychelles, Malaysia, Japan) but Indonesia for now, but I've been working remotely for about as long (a little bit longer) as well over multiple jobs.
> And did you feel your quality of life improve?
Compared to my COL in Boston (and midwest and other places in NE/NYC before that) and what I'm getting now? Yes
We have titanic businesses with almost superhuman like abilities to get under our skin at an algorithmic level. Tech companies can literally, for all intents and purposes, make people disappear from the internet. A small group of companies can casually destroy your life with a small code change and you wouldn't even know it. Everyone's data is being sold, stolen, sold on the black market, and intercepted by governments both local and foreign. An internet outage now means that your thermostat or fridge could go out and you're going to spend the night cold.
I mean, there's a reason that Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the most hyped games of the last 5 years. The anxiety resonates. Sometimes I wonder if there are people in tech/cable who grew up reading Neuromancer or Snow Crash and thought "Cool! Let's make it happen!"