This gut feeling I have had for a while, that we haven’t fully understood the impact of the new technologies and will soon start to notice less productive side effects, is reinforced by Bruce Sterling’s latest State of the World address.

you’ve treated your future as an “unpredictable lurching thing…” and now you’re all morose about that… You and your generation CREATED that situation! Ever heard of “disruptive innovation,” “disintermediation,” “offshoring,” “small pieces loosely joined,” “de-monetization,” “plug and play” “the network as a platform”? Of course you’ve heard of all that crap, because you’ve been tub-thumping it your entire adult life, but what the hell did you think that was all about? Did you think you were gonna bend every effort to virtualize reality, and then get a gold railway-retirement watch and a safe place to park the cradle? Guys with stacks of gold bars and working oil wells don’t have any stability now! Much less guys like you, who move their fingers up and down on keyboards for a living.

Link

Technologies might have disrupted (rich countries’) social organizations a bit beyond what would have been productive course. We now face some of the problems we created (and naively wished for?). Time to put technology back in its place, something I have been preaching for a while, unfortunately without yet having found a solution to apply it to myself.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 9:11 am and is filed under society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.