The Web Summit: Watching the World Rot

Uncomfortably accurate. If tech is supposed to make the world a better place (however you define better) and the people we inflict products on walk away disgusted by the cutting edge of tech, that's a problem.

It doesn't matter how poorly the article articulates itself, when devs care more about the next round of investment, or simply being able to say "I work in a start-up" than if their idea is actually going to help people, then we are doing it wrong.

It is entirely understandable to appear as a Luddite when the people developing and pushing the technology have no regard for the wider societal impact of their creations.

I can't help but hear echoes to the same motions made at the onset of the industrial revolution, and almost every decade since. Humanity does not die, it just changes, but a given generation often seems very locked in time in its perceptions and what it recognizes as "human".

If the article was a thrust against a work obsessed culture, it could have done that better and more concisely. If the article was a thrust against how distinct the tech zeitgeist has become from what other bubbles in the world care about, it could have done that better and more concisely. Perhaps I'm missing the point, in which case feel free to enlighten me, but this article didn't accomplish that.

(Some irony in that since I'd typically be the first to agree with either statement, but I found myself asking repeatedly what I was supposed to be convinced of in the article, other than some "vague almost luddite anger" at the tech community)

I'm having to read the article in w3m as The Atlantic is convinced that I have an advert blocking script installed. I don't. The network I am on has aggressive filtering.

Sort of goes with the theme really does it not?

Is this journalism or a blog-rant?

"I went to a professional conference of a profession I don't have anything to do with and wrote an overwrought blog post a month later"

I feel like I'd be a lot more convinced by this if the author made a genuine attempt to understand the conference instead of interpreting his ignorance as proof of tech's "rot".

  "brings the next generation of B2C, B2B, B2E platforms to a high qualified partners network supported by a great business model,” you can make the vague assumption that all this gibberish might actually mean something to someone somewhere."

Sure, we have jargon, just like any other industry. For anyone who cares to take 2 seconds, it's really not difficult to understand that B2B is a business selling to other businesses.

  "This isn’t meaning, in any of its usual senses, something that exists to be understood, but the zombie signifier, words building and feeding on each other to form a system terrifyingly self-sustaining and utterly opaque."

Again, that's basically how all language works. Language is a self-sustaining thing. I agree that it's opaque, but not uniquely so.

As much as I dislike this article though, I do agree with the basic premise that tech really is filled with claims like “data is the new performance” and an overuse of "innovation", I just don't believe that glorifying your alienation is useful for anyone.

Aside from using Google to understand specific pieces of jargon, we can actually take a step back and understand why it develops in the first place. In a world where companies rely on VC backing, and startup valuations obey a power law[0], entrepreneurs effectively have no choice other than grandiose claims if they want any hope of securing funding. Due to massive uncertainty, it's literally not worth it for VCs to invest in a company that doesn't have the potential to become hugely successful[1].

None of this is to say that the jargon is justified or good, just that there are actually ways to understand this stuff that can be useful for people who want to help shape the world instead of leaving us with

  "The end of humanity had already arrived; it was everywhere around us."

[0] http://reactionwheel.net/2015/06/power-laws-in-venture.html

[1] https://blog.ycombinator.com/why-vcs-sometimes-push-companie...