INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FROM THE INSIDE
“If the world must be reborn, might as well dress for the occasion”
-Debonair Zed
I once talked to a friend about Web 3 and how it could be the solution to the centralized finance system governed by a couple of rich people living on an island somewhere in the world.
He said: “The cause starts always as something for the greater good but you can never know”. The sentence holds immense weight in the thoughts I will share with you in this story. One that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Seeing what Web 2 is already doing to the world makes me skeptical enough about the web in general. If you’re unfamiliar with Web 3, it has 4 fundamentals: decentralization, AI, Trustfulness, and connectivity. In a nutshell, web 3 aims to give back control to people over their data and eventually their choices over the internet.
As you can tell, The cause is for the greater good but that was the case with Web 2, smartphones, computers, and everything that big tech companies provide us with. The question to ask here is at what cost? To what extent have social media and fundamentally the internet changed the course of our lives?
Most of us know that these companies are selling our sensitive information to advertisers. We became familiar with these shenanigans. It became a part of our daily humor. We know that we are tracked on and off our smartphones. We probably wander around the world carrying ideas that were never ours and defending beliefs that we never had. Have you ever thought about the person that you could’ve been without social media from 10 years ago till now? I did, the scary part is that I don’t know. I couldn’t find an answer to it. It made me reconsider my daily routine, my activities on my smartphone and laptop, and of course the whole information technology dilemma of where are we going with IT and what is the future hiding for us.
the last straw that broke the camel’s back was the Apple Vision Pro. The footage of people wearing those ridiculous goggles in public scared me. It flipped some switch inside my consciousness. It felt like I woke up from the matrix. Seeing people walk around with that device attached to their heads made me notice the device that’s been attached to my hand since 9 years ago. My smartphone. And my friends had so many open debates about how useful it is despite the harm that’s causing to our mental health. It always ends up with “We have nothing to do about it”. Indeed we don’t. It radically changed our modern way of living. It did because it is useful to a certain extent. It was a good product before we became the product that’s being traded off for a lot of money to advertisers.
I think that technology is doing more harm than good. To me at least. Think about what harm it is doing to young people and kids. In the picture above you can see big tech companies testify before Congress about this very topic: children's safety over the internet. This is the link for the full YouTube video if you want to watch it yourself. Overall, I think we’re going to battle bare-handed. The deed is done, especially if you know kids are prone to addictive behavior more than adults. The play should be about what can we do to save the generations of tomorrow. How can we raise future people to live a life addiction-free of harmful tech?
As I mentioned before I’ve reconsidered my daily routine that’s related to screen time in general. I want to share with you a couple of thoughts on this. It matters to me that you’re aware even if you don’t change your behavior because someday I think you will. I began by using an anti-tracker search engine and a navigator called DuckDuckGo. It does not track your behavior online but it doesn’t keep you safe while using Google or Meta products. I’ve noticed that several pages on DuckDuckGo show me totally different content from Chromium-based browsers. Chromium is the core navigator that resides in any browser you’re using except of course anti-trackers. I’ve deleted the Facebook App and set a half-hour timer on Instagram. I am trying to invest my screen time on mostly YouTube and Reddit at the moment. all of this is on a mission to get back my regular attention span as a normal human being. I’ve been also avoiding cookies a lot. If the website forces them I try to look for my needs elsewhere. Generally, I want to avoid trackers and rationalize screen time on my smartphone to only read emails and reply to important texts. Other than that it all should go to hell if you ask me.
There’s a great documentary made by Netflix named “The Social Dilemma” You might want to have a look at that. As an IT guy saddens me that dystopia is just the other side of the same coin with Tech. We got a lot closer to where we should draw the line more than what you can imagine. And the line itself got a lot thinner. I now think to myself how the dream of working for a big tech company fell apart. Working for a small company with a salary that will help me eat well and sleep at night is much better than working for people who have blood on their hands and tolerate child abuse.
On that note, thank you for making it to the end. It means a lot. As I always say take good care of yourself and your loved ones. We’re in this together.
