I'm tired of pretending tech makes things better.
I'm tired of kidding myself that all these apps, these chatbots, these "tools" are doing anything but dragging us into the mud and the shit and calling it progress.
I sat down at a cafe a few days ago, hungry and ready
Is that the fault of the technology, though, or is that the fault of the companies?
Companies can have stupid, arbitrary rules and requirements and policies and do stupid or harmful actions regardless of technology or not.
I don’t think it’s fair to blame tech for company policies.
I keep hearing about it’s just “fault of companies” as if companies weren’t lead by the tech bros. By that logic all the pollution BP and other oil companies cause is just company decisions ! It’s not the fault of oil that greedy oil barons exist… yet it’s the burning oil causing the pollution (admittedly not best example but sort of holds)
Often times the tech companies try to “disrupt” a particular industry by providing a tech based approach and then lobbying the legacy business out of existence thus limiting your choices. This is why the tech enshitification works, because there is no real competition. The uber wealthy simply force feed you what they want. Uber, Netflix, and Amazon all operated at a loss specifically to be able to starve out legitimate businesses and limit your choice to only what they provide. Now we don’t have much of independent book stores, taxis outside of big metro hubs, and god only knows what’s going on with streaming service prices.
The ultimate fuck you from modern tech is the “if you don’t like it, don’t use it” while at the same time they work tirelessly for their tech “solution” to be the only choice.
So yea a ton of tech sucks and exists only to extract value out of its users and not solve any concrete issue