Troubleshooting Life 10, January 10 - It’s not the technology, but what you do with it.

"Hold your cell phone for 30 seconds and think backwards through its production. You have the entire techno-industrial culture… You see mining, transportation, manufacturing, computers, high-speed communications, satellite communications, it's all there.” - Doug Tompkins, cofounder of The North Face, in a 2013 Guardian article

Reader, the Cambridge Analytica scandal taught me that Facebook (Meta) is not what I or my then teen friends thought: free cloud storage to store the photos or videos I took on my phone.

So I can save storage for new music or movies in an industry that is always releasing more!

I since learned, Because it is free, its users become the product.

Meta actually takes my self-uploaded data to target me with ads, and even try to influence my political choices. So no, neither Facebook nor Instagram are “free” in that sense.

It is comforting to believe Silicon Valley guys like Zuck will save the world, but this is false.

Will these guys save you from bad air in New York from Canadian wildfires, June 2023? No.

The computer is a mechanism for acceleration. Social media amplifies what is already there within you, and can create echo chambers all around you to influence your media diet.

Doug Tompkins was a friend of Steve Jobs. The two men had many arguments.

Steve tried convincing Doug that computers were going to save the world.

Doug kept saying the opposite: yes, individuals use computers largely for narrow interests.

But the real winners are large corporations that are able to take advantage of a person’s narrow needs, on a massive worldwide scale, to become firms so powerful they are like governments.

ACTION POINT: It’s not the technology, it’s what you do with it.