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naminnuts.bsky.social
@naminnuts.bsky.social
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edzitron.com
Tech has stopped being about helping YOU do things - it's now a means for management consultants to use software to penetrate/monetize every aspect of our lives, all while expressing growth to the markets. This is the growth-at-all-costs Rot Economy.
www.wheresyoured.at/what-were-fighting-for/
Technology has, in many ways, stopped being about "using technology to help people do things," or at the very least "help the user do something that they want to do." Software has, as Marc Andreessen said it would in 2011, eaten the world, and has done so in the nakedly-cynical and usurious way that he wanted it to, prioritizing the invasion of our lives through prioritizing growth - and the collection of as much data as possible on the user — over any particular utility or purpose. Andreessen and his ilk saw (and see) software not as a thing that provides value, but as a means for the tech industry to penetrate and "disrupt" as many industries as possible, pushing legacy providers to "transform themselves into software companies" rather than using software to make their products better, describing Pixar — the studio that made movies like Toy Story and Inside Out that was acquired by Disney in 2006 — as a software company rather than a company that makes something using software. I realize this sounds like semantics, but let me put it another way: software has, for the tech industry, become far more about extracting economic value than it has in providing it. When the tech industry becomes focused on penetrating markets (to quote Andreessen, "software companies....[taking] over large swathes of the economy") there's little consideration of whether said software is prioritizing the solution to a problem. Nowhere is this more obvious than the software we use in our professional lives. Microsoft Teams is one of the single worst products l've ever used, because Microsoft's goal isn't to make it easy to have digital meetings, but to make a product good enough and cheap enough to make it easier for your boss to buy the entire Microsoft 365 Suite, even if most of the parts of said suite kind of suck. Here's another great example: Google Drive. Google Drive is absolutely fucking awful. The people responsible for designing Google Drive's user interface should be made to explain themselves before a judge. Why can't you sort files by size? Why does it only show image and video thumbnails when viewing a folder in a grid layout? Why, when you attempt to move a file to a folder, are the suggested folders — literally the first window you see — always, without fail, wrong? The proliferation of software throughout society has been led by the stewards of the Rot Economy, as software - along with its associated managed services — can effectively proliferate infinitely, and can take advantage of how many corporations are run by management consultants (and filled with middle managers) that don't do any real work or have any true connections to the problems they solve.
February 11, 2025 at 2:04 PM