STEFANO BOSCUTTI - Techno-pessimist

Will all the techno-optimists please shut the fuck up.

We’re continually mistreated, manipulated and harangued by the tech industry. Product after product is designed to work against our best interests.

Our data, thoughts and connections are mined and sold six million ways from Sunday. We are constantly spammed out of existence - spam calls, spam texts, spam messages, spam notifications, spam socials.

We can’t see a simple feed of our friends’ thoughts or videos in chronological order without algorithms shoving in a slew of ads and sponsored content.

At work we’re forced to subscribe to software as service products like Microsoft, Asana, Slack, Zoom, Sap, Xero, Shopify, Mailchimp, Salesforce. All with their own inconsistent multi-layered settings and strings of annoyances with update after update after update.

All those updates? They just add more code and make things worse as they strive for more control. (Is Microsoft Word any better now than when it was first introduced forty years ago?)

All this technology is pushed down from on high to streamline operations, boost productivity, lift culture and improve customer satisfaction. Which sounds great on product websites.

In the real world it’s one miserable mess after the other. The tech industry has ruined the internet for everyone.

We can’t absorb their greed any longer.