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Replying to
In that essay I reached 3 conclusions: 1. “Tech is not technological activity per se, it is a rate regime of technological evolution, defined as “fast enough”, and a necessary and sufficient condition to be a technologist in Tech, or a Techie, is simply being able to keep up.“
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2. “Tech is a single, connected, hydra, within which technologists make almost all the decisions that matter. Because they’re by definition the only ones keeping up sufficiently with the nature of the potential coming online, and thinking about what to do with it”
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3. “... VC sector is a sign that an area of technology is part of Tech. When technologists are in the driver’s seat, patterns of return on capital acquire a certain generic predictability (in terms of time horizons and rates) that allows for an efficient kind of investing.”
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tldr “Tech is a growing agency pie, and a Techie could be defined as someone who is participating in a way that they’re gaining agency faster than secondary actors can take it away. So Tech is simply the collection of all such Techies in a densely connected social graph”
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Re the “can Tech die” question I concluded that while it can’t die, it can slow down to the point of going dormant if other kinds of minority decision-makers, esp financiers and politicians, who slow tech to their speed rather than try to keep up, take over from technologists.
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I made this 3-phase diagram 1. When a few humans keep up with tech, you get Coherent Tech (eg 1978-2000) 2. When everybody gets caught up you get Incoherent Tech based on expanding access (eg 2001-15) 3. When politicians and financiers take over you get Stagnant Tech (2016 -)
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This is neither good or bad. It’s an inevitable refractory phase. As in a period after a peak/burst of activity becomes unresponsive for a while. It’s not adoption exhaustion. There’s always fresh young people to feed Tech and be fed by it. It’s governance exhaustion.
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Anyhow, that’s setting the stage on where my head was pre-Covid. I too was caught up in SV-framed views of Tech future. For the past year, my primary frame has shifted to rewilding Tech (or the human side, rewilding engineers and engineering).
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If you want the stagnation to last only 10 years instead of 1000 (we’re 5 years in IMO), rewilding Tech and techies is the key. Dark ages are Tech refractory periods where the cycle stalls instead of restarting. We’re dangerously on the cusp of stall.
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Replying to
Thoughts: 1) Despite the recognition that Tech is a human endeavor, there's a haunting here of Tech as a phenomenon of its own, waxing and waning in relation to human activity, almost as an independent force. Tech determinism? Maybe. Perhaps a strong dose of Donna Haraway helps.
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