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I think I'm coming to a new understanding on this. A big part of it is down-scoping. I can't single handedly control incentives. But I can learn to get better at social problems. I can talk to the people around me, and attempt to convince them to act. We can come to agreements and solve localized versions of these problems. It's not easy to do so in a dedicated and continuous manner, especially with positive externalities, but it is possible.
%title The Problems are all Social now
I keep coming back to this idea, and it brings me great dread, because my entire career is dependent on doing technical things, so what happens when these aren't the problems that I'm invested in tackling?
We have amazing technology. Science research across the board (material, chemical, biological, physical) has discovered, created and sometimes even commercialized truly magical technology. We live in the Future. It's everything you dreamed of, but worse.
We've learnt how to build private currency, but not what to do with it. We've made software that can pass The Turing test. We still don't really know what to do with it. We can ingest, index and transform more data than we could even hope to imagine, let alone capture. Human Genome sequencing has been fucking commercialized!
But the problems we face have nothing to do with further advances in Engineering, or Science. Climate change, egregious wealth inequality, rising authoritarianism.
Or even if we look exclusively at Big Tech: Misinformation, Surveillance, and Mega Monopolies are widespread across the industry. Everything is fuelled by Ads, so it doesn't matter what you make. If you can think it, we can build it, and inject ads into it, and then parachute off even though technically the company isn't profitable. Hey, maybe you'll get bought by some mega corp and make out Rich.
And that seems to be the problem.
%title The Problems are no longer Technical
It's no secret that my mind has been struggling lately. Further thoughts on this same subject has led me to the path of Degrowth.