Quote:
Originally Posted by Dorian Gray
It did later change the world with the iPhone, but that turned out to be change of the wrong sort and the start of my disillusion with ‘technology’ and eventual distrust of it. Looking around today we see that Silicon Valley culture has spread across the world at terrible cost to happiness in the workplace, tech has enabled unthinkable politics to become mainstream, inequality is worse than at any time since the 1920s with no audible alternative thought leadership, and we’re screwing the planet and anyone who’s slightly different from us with extraordinary disdain for the consequences. And since journalists and intellectuals have been replaced by charlatans and social media influencers, it’s hard to imagine a way out in the forseeable future. There may be a major reset in my lifetime, but in the meantime grimness extends as far as the eye can discern in any direction.
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Well, this paragraph is a lot.
First of all, the second coming of smartphones has been a huge boon to the world. It's not without problems, such as privacy issues, excessive screen time, and a race-to-the-bottom consumer software market, but it has improved enriched billions of people. It's a humongous deal.
Second, your political assertions mostly only apply to the first world. Globally speaking, there has never been a better time. Between 1980 and 2015, extreme poverty went down from 44% to just 9.6%! Or, to put that in absolute numbers, it went down from 1.96 billion people to 705 million. Other statistics are equally heartening.
I'm quite concerned with some political trends, but to conclude that everything is worse is simplistic — and approaching political topics simplistically is, ironically, one of the big problems we're having right now.