Published on 12, July, 2020
Smartphones these days seem to be a requirement in order to be a human being.
My work are requiring me to download an app which I can't and won't do. I was asked a few years ago to become part of a work whatsapp group. I was indirectly made to feel I wasn't part of the team bease i couldnt and didnt want to be in it. Last night, instead of looking my name up on a computer for a ticket, a "box office assistant" made the person I was with re-download an app to get an e-ticket with an animated barcode. I know my stubbornness is making me technologically illiterate but I don't care.
We started becoming machines during the industrial revolution. Today we continue to advance toward this. It's part of our evolution as we get further away from who we were.
My concern is that we are becoming technologically inbred. Too much of our technology runs on the same system if it was a fatal flaw there wouldn’t necessarily be another code Base or hardware format fall back on.
Too much of a technology is controlled by a handful of companies that can dictate Poor conditions of service or otherwise change the terms as they wish. Equally that gives governments more control to dictate the same features in multiple technology features could someday be used to infringe on peoples privacy or set up totalitarian systems of control.
Homogenisation of technology and the concentration of data in the hands of a few people is a far greater threat than technology infiltrating a society in and of itself if there were 15 different popular smartphone manufacturers with different operating systems and more or less open markets for anyone including open source developers to make software for that hardware it wouldn’t be nearly such a threat.
Just like having a diverse gene pool makes the species more robust having lots of different systems with lots of different hardware and software would make our technology more robust to Day zero flaws, government exploitation, anti-competitive and privacy infringing practices. Our technology is inbred it practically has a Habsburg jaw.
And it is used to manipulate us