Here are my thoughts on why the tech world sucks now. Probably nothing super new here, but it’s been bugging me so I’m writing it down.
When I started in tech in the 1980s it was still the refuge of outcasts and misfits. It wasn’t cool and it wasn’t a way to huge riches. The people who were into it knew what it was like to feel like outsiders.
While some of them grew up to be toxic (eg, Scott Adams), a lot of them saw tech as a way to help the most marginalized of us, and as a way to improve all of society. Bill Joy, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs — they’ve all strived in their way to help.
If you watch the old videos of the tech people I most admire you’ll see they are filled with optimism that tech could empower the powerless. Tech was for everyone.
But then some dudes got super-rich on tech, and suddenly it was the cool thing to do. The kind of people who would normally focus on, say, sports, now found that focusing on tech was cool and also led to money. So we were invaded by jocks.
And, surprise, the jocks brought with them the same sense of exclusion, the same focus on profits, the same disregard for whether what they create is empowering as they brought to finance in previous generations.
The jocks don’t really care about the implications of technology, they want to do whatever seems cool at the moment and most likely to look like success. So they get on stage wearing four popped collars at once and announce their latest cryptocurrency or nonsense social platform.
So video games are now gambling platforms and frankly not any fun. Tech jocks line up to use whatever buzzword technology sounds newest and figure out new ways to monetize instead of trying to make things that add value to people’s lives. Software is rented. Ads are everywhere.
All the independent Apple developers I know are struggling, because Apple has set unrealistic price expectations in their App Store by giving away their apps and preventing us from charging for upgrades. Apple’s response is “rent them your software” as if that’s good for users.
These are decisions based on what’s hot now, not based on a long-term view of what’s even good for Apple. Eventually if they kill off their independent developers they'll have nothing that distinguishes their platform, and it'll dies. It’s happened before.
