Ed Zitron Nails the State of Tech
There are things that you read where every word hits. This is one of those pieces, and it’s long. Ed Zitron says what I have been both feeling and saying for the last decade of tech in his own special way. There was an inflection point where technology companies went from making our lives better to making it worse in most ways, and doing so while making society more reliant on them.
I have pulled a few excerpts from the post below, but please go and read the whole thing. Consumers and customers are not powerless against this, but it will take most coming to terms with the reality first.
The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible
You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.
Things are being made linearly worse in the pursuit of growth in every aspect of our digital lives, and it’s because everything must grow, at all costs, at all times, unrelentingly, even if it makes the technology we use every day consistently harmful.
We as a society need to reckon with how this twists us up, makes us more paranoid, more judgmental, more aggressive, more reactionary, because when everything is subtly annoying, we all simmer and suffer in manifold ways.