Technology needs more humanity

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Why is crypto a thing, still?

There's the paranoid fear that a spooky cabal of technocrats at the Federal Reserve — unaccountable, incomprehensible — might one day make ordinary money go poof! There's the success of the young bros who minted a fortune convincing other young bros to embrace the thing — luring a generation with dim job prospects anyway to take a shot at getting rich from their bedroom.

Can that be all, though? You might expect some urgency to find a purpose for a technology that consumes more power than Australia, yet hasn't been able to develop a real-world function other than paying for ransom, drugs or child porn. But once you get past the greater fool theory, you are left with little more than a slogan: It's hi-tech.

I'm talking about a problem that goes way beyond crypto: the lack of purpose, the absence of a reason for society to keep churning out more “new, new things,” despite the costs, driven by a narrative contrived in Silicon Valley that features technology, any technology, inevitably powering human progress.

In the valley's telling, interrogating this progress is best left to the Luddites. But the self-assured march of newfangled technologies onto society demands a critical evaluation. Because the casualties of progress are piling up, calling into question why we're deploying such technologies in the first place.

The social consequences of social media are chilling not just for their proven potential to distort the national conversation, spreading misinformation too fast for the truth to catch up. As many observers have also complained, they are substituting online social connections for real ones, building alternate realities open to manipulation in pursuit of profit.

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