Uncomfortably accurate. If tech is supposed to make the world a better place (however you define better) and the people we inflict products on walk away disgusted by the cutting edge of tech, that's a problem.
It doesn't matter how poorly the article articulates itself, when devs care more about the next round of investment, or simply being able to say "I work in a start-up" than if their idea is actually going to help people, then we are doing it wrong.
It is entirely understandable to appear as a Luddite when the people developing and pushing the technology have no regard for the wider societal impact of their creations.
Is the Web Summit "the cutting edge of tech"? I'm not sure where my impression comes from, but I don't particularly associate it with high quality, more with mass.
But even if it is not, it likely represents a large subset of the "scene", so observations about it are still interesting.
Peter Thiel summed this all up perfectly: "We were promised flying cars but all we got was 140 characters." I found his talk [1] about the state of technology very accurate. And after watching it I turned on Bloomberg and happened to see Snapchat s IPO for a few billion.
I can't help but hear echoes to the same motions made at the onset of the industrial revolution, and almost every decade since. Humanity does not die, it just changes, but a given generation often seems very locked in time in its perceptions and what it recognizes as "human".
If the article was a thrust against a work obsessed culture, it could have done that better and more concisely. If the article was a thrust against how distinct the tech zeitgeist has become from what other bubbles in the world care about, it could have done that better and more concisely. Perhaps I'm missing the point, in which case feel free to enlighten me, but this article didn't accomplish that.
(Some irony in that since I'd typically be the first to agree with either statement, but I found myself asking repeatedly what I was supposed to be convinced of in the article, other than some "vague almost luddite anger" at the tech community)
Funny, that. The industrial revolution brought very real problems and caused very real suffering. True, humanity doesn't die, it just changes, but that's cold comfort to significant chunks of humanity that die precisely because of those changes. It reminds me of something I read yesterday:
"Capitalism was so cruel and brutal 100 years ago that people came up with an even worse solution, communism. Rather than make compromises that would take the wind out of communism's sails, the 1 percent of the day decided to back fascism. This caused a war so catastrophic that the 1 percent understood they had no choice but to accept reforms that would make life bearable for regular people.
"Then communism collapsed, taking the daily threat of nuclear war with it. Today's 1 percent should be thanking God they got out of the 20th century alive and vowing never to make those mistakes again. Instead they've decided to make every mistake again and turn capitalism back into something that human beings cannot live with.
It's from an article[1] by Jon Schwarz in The Intercept, about Donald Trump's victory, but that little bit resonated strongly with me. It's becoming increasingly obvious that something about capitalism needs to change; I'm not sure what, but we can all see effects everywhere around us. The Web Summit is just one more example of what happens when you live in a system that focuses solely on optimizing one variable at the expense of all others.
I'm having to read the article in w3m as The Atlantic is convinced that I have an advert blocking script installed. I don't. The network I am on has aggressive filtering.
Sam Kriss has an extremely polarizing style. I find myself really liking about 30% of the things he publishes, and thinking the rest are absolute garbage.
I feel like I'd be a lot more convinced by this if the author made a genuine attempt to understand the conference instead of interpreting his ignorance as proof of tech's "rot".
"brings the next generation of B2C, B2B, B2E platforms to a high qualified partners network supported by a great business model,” you can make the vague assumption that all this gibberish might actually mean something to someone somewhere."
Sure, we have jargon, just like any other industry. For anyone who cares to take 2 seconds, it's really not difficult to understand that B2B is a business selling to other businesses.
"This isn’t meaning, in any of its usual senses, something that exists to be understood, but the zombie signifier, words building and feeding on each other to form a system terrifyingly self-sustaining and utterly opaque."
Again, that's basically how all language works. Language is a self-sustaining thing. I agree that it's opaque, but not uniquely so.
As much as I dislike this article though, I do agree with the basic premise that tech really is filled with claims like “data is the new performance” and an overuse of "innovation", I just don't believe that glorifying your alienation is useful for anyone.
Aside from using Google to understand specific pieces of jargon, we can actually take a step back and understand why it develops in the first place. In a world where companies rely on VC backing, and startup valuations obey a power law[0], entrepreneurs effectively have no choice other than grandiose claims if they want any hope of securing funding. Due to massive uncertainty, it's literally not worth it for VCs to invest in a company that doesn't have the potential to become hugely successful[1].
None of this is to say that the jargon is justified or good, just that there are actually ways to understand this stuff that can be useful for people who want to help shape the world instead of leaving us with
"The end of humanity had already arrived; it was everywhere around us."
The author admits that the B2B & B2E tagline may have actual meaning. His example of a completely meaningless slogan is "“transforming the way people search and protect all the things they can’t live without”.
You don't need any technical knowledge to see that as indeed almost completely devoid of meaning.
This isn't a luddite. He's not criticizing self-driving cars or the cure for cancer. His issue is with the 90% of startups which are completely which could vanish at any moment without altering the course of history one bit.
It's not an appeal for standstill – it's a motivational speech to search for meaning.
It doesn't matter how poorly the article articulates itself, when devs care more about the next round of investment, or simply being able to say "I work in a start-up" than if their idea is actually going to help people, then we are doing it wrong.
It is entirely understandable to appear as a Luddite when the people developing and pushing the technology have no regard for the wider societal impact of their creations.