The Tech Lords are Fools and Knaves

It’s easy, after the notorious censorship of the New York Post’s investigative piece on Joe Biden’s corruption, to blame Big Tech for being evil. But I think the problem is deeper than that. I think the problem is what you might call the Lina Lamont Problem: the Tech Lords are not as smart as they think they are.

You remember Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain and her Jaysey accent: “What d’yer think I yam? Dumb or Some’pn?”

Let’s get real about the Pichais, the @jacks, the Zucks of the world. They are super-duper at building tech empires. But when would they have had time for anything except ingesting the conventional political wisdom of their class and generation?

I can even see an innocent reason for censoring the Post’s piece for “hacking” and publishing embarrassing private information. It’s understandable that the Tech Lords would want to damp down the plebs from publishing each other's sordid little scandals. There’s a kind of Tech Lordly noblesse oblige about making sure that the plebs behave: Don’t want to lower the tone of the social media, old chap.

Problem is, dear Tech Lords, that everything in politics is about hacking and publishing the embarrassing private information of the opposition. Here is Charles Dickens in 1843 satirizing the New York press of the time. He writes, in Martin Chuzzlewit, of the “New York Sewer” and the Sewer's exclusive account of a flagrant act of dishonesty committed by the Secretary of State when he was eight years old; now communicated, at a great expense, by his own nurse.

The social media have been led to believe (by the people) that they are godlike and all powerful...they are not. They have a switch to turn the people off, but the people have a bigger switch. I hope that the bigger switch will turn them off. Do we really need Twitter? Do we really need Facebook? They are acting like drugs and the people are acting like addicts. The best way to overcome that is to replace it with something else.

They are acting like drugs and the people are acting like addicts. The best way to overcome that is to replace it with something else.
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Start with those smart phones.

I get that everyone needs a comm device. But probably 90% of the texted messages are just dumb....it is like always being able to talk to your BFF, no matter what else is going on and while all sorts of other facets of life _are_ going on.

But, do you need to be online 24/7 with a mobile computer? How much of that time is spent playing games? And they are low-level games, designed to be anti-stressors....so, maybe it is the connection itself that is stressful.

With the lockdown, people spend a lot of time with their families. I will bet they still text them, even though one is in the kitchen and the other is out in the yard.

Don’t even mention the tracking ability of the phones. Not just location, but your every fleeting thought, goes through a search engine. You think about buying something. Search it. You think about a recipe. Search it. You can’t remember something. Ditto. And then all those thoughts are aggregated into your profile and people are surprised they are assigned a marketing niche of such fine granularity.

Ditch the phone. Calls can be returned later. Messages of import can be reviewed in other than real time. Put the computer to sleep or shut it off and go do something else. Then, when you do connect, maybe you’ll have something interesting to talk or write about.

Because, above all else, this constant connection makes us all too familiar to each other and you know what familiarity breeds.

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