The saddest thing for me about modern tech’s long spiral into user manipulation and surveillance is how it has just slowly killed off the joy that people like me used to feel about new tech. Every product Meta or Amazon announces makes the future seem bleaker and grayer. 1/n
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It used to be the opposite. Tech was one of the things I loved most. I still remember the feeling when I rode the first BART trains in SF. When I saw my first Concorde my little head exploded. My Commodore PET. The last time tech made me truly gleeful was these glories 2/3
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What will it take for us to get that feeling back? I don’t think it’s just my nostalgia, is it? There’s no longer anything being promised to us by tech companies that we actually need or asked for. Just more monitoring, more nudging, more draining of our data, our time, our joy.
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Lol - sounds like a symptom of ageing. There are 10x more interesting tech trends now than 20-40 years ago:
ML to AGI
Quantum CPUs
AVs, drones, flying cars
Agtech like AV tractors & vertical farms
Fintech/crypto
Etc
Read less of the tech press & spend more time w/ founders?
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I built a platform with zero user PII, zero web trackers, no accounts, and proven you can get better audience performance without it. I’ve also sat in board rooms with major corporations where they told me…but we want all that data. So it’s been a tough path to walk.
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forgive me for the naive question, but these products have to have engineers behind them, right? do they uh not find joy in their work? is it the case that many people working in product dont enjoy what theyre doing? im asking bc i have no idea what the Industry At Large is like
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>these products have to have engineers behind them, right?
This is a dangerous question because eventually you arrive at the idea that we need to harm nerds until they learn how to behave.