My feelings on tech are complicated.
On the one hand, I have a career doing something I enjoy (most days) because of tech. I have a house because of tech. I am talking to you here, now, even though we're strangers who live miles (or continents) away from each other because of tech. I learned to cook from YouTube videos and learned to code from StackOverflow. It has unambiguously enriched my life, and the lives of millions of people.
10 years ago, that would have been the end of what I had to say on tech. An unalloyed good that was going to lead humanity to the utopian future promised by Star Trek. I was a techie, an enthusiast, but something changed.
I guess it was Cambridge Analytica first, for me. Facebook was an awesome place where I could keep up with my friends who had scattered to the winds after college. To see the kid of deep surveillance data that Facebook had, and who they were selling that data to, rocked me. Still, it was one company, and Zuck has always been kind of a creep. Then we found out that Google was doing the same shit, and Instagram was designed to be addictive, and YouTube was designed to be addictive, and all these platforms are designed to be as enraging as possible because rage is engaging and engagement sells. Don't get me started on Musk and Twitter.
It makes me sad. Maybe because it reminds me that I was naïve when I was young or maybe because I miss what being naïve felt like. It makes me sad because it feels like we could have used this tech to really make the world a better place if the people who wanted to do that could have just seized power instead of disappear inside of their imaginary worlds. It makes me sad because if the revolutions of the past ~40 years couldn't undo the brutal hold greed and selfishness have over our culture and institutions then I am not sure anything can short of another Great Depression or World War III.
What really kills me is that there are still good things coming out of tech. AI seems very likely to lead to real medical breakthroughs that will help people live longer healthier lives... as long as they can afford them. It just might also lead to mass joblessness and poverty. So it's a mixed bag.
I still like monkeying around on the internet. I think I always will. So here's a shrine to that, and to the small corners of the web that still feel like they're connecting people rather than driving them apart.