Tech Trends 2014
frogdesign.com
frogdesign.com
I am hoping it will finally happen in 2014. It is such a pity that the machines for work and work places are not improving as the rest of the products - and in my opinion laptops are mostly getting worse: mirrors instead of displays, wide-screens (instead of high screens), and dumping accessible design: crappy keyboards, no options for track points and those who have the best track points remove the mouse buttons. It's nice to have a long battery life and a light laptop, but it does not help for the primary task, where I have my hands lying on the keyboard and staring at the screen.
This had just to go off my chest.
Privacy is clearly moving from a struggle to remain anonymous from the powers that be to a real business opportunity.
The consumer follows that trend as real material consequences impact individuals and receive press coverage. The average consumer understands when they have to switch out their credit cards repeatedly due to theft. Gamers understand when a kid gets sent to prison for trash-talking someone on Facebook. When the IRS uses Facebook postings to augment their audits, or local prosecutors pull your accounts to convict you for something, then the need for privacy becomes more obvious.
Privacy is the necessary antecedent to security. It's funny that almost every other poll option points towards increasing totalitarian control and lesser security for everyone. It looks like tech in general is trying to frogmarch new developments before they can be properly secured -- cobbling together networks that are fragile to pillage, like building un-walled cities in Genghis Khan's grazing grounds.
"We also say don't trust anyone who offers you protection, whether it's the U.S. government or anybody else. That's a story they put out. It's repeated to people who are a little nervous. They think they can always find someone to protect them. No, you can't. You've got to protect yourself. You know where I learned that? From the cypherpunks."
So whenever I see snapchat and the like being peddled as such, I have chuckle because shows me the banality of privacy as a service[1]. I'll reserve any hope for anything otherwise when the behaviors of people reflect such ideals they want others to live by.
[0]: http://www.cnet.com/news/wikileaks-estranged-co-founder-beco...
[1]: http://blog.pictobar.com/post/63785124046/the-banality-of-pr...
When a post has had significant attention within about a year, we kill reposts as duplicates. If the repost already has an ongoing discussion, we don't kill it, just demote it in rank. That way people can keep discussing.
Technology is important and mostly a force for good, but right now the industry has (and deservingly so) lost the trust of, well, everyone.
As we realize that technology is too important to be trusted to arrogant, myopic, sloppy, sexist, and often deeply classist Silicon Valley assholes, we're going to see only more controversy. With that will come (disliked and sometimes wrongheaded) regulation, increasing class tension, and perhaps a widespread loss of faith in the current technological leadership.
The truth is that most tech companies are horrible. They're horrible to their own employees (mean-spirited stack-ranking policies) and horrible to their users and the world outside of them. They've turned the Valley into an Uberized, Snow Crash cesspool.
In about 12 months, we've gone from tech exceptionalism (pundits asking why Wall Street talent wasn't "doing good for the world" in Silicon Valley) to a full-on hatred of this industry, and it's deserved. Rank-and-file programmers who ride Google buses don't deserve to be harassed, but the leadership deserves far more hate than it has seen so far.
Technology has to make a new choice. Either it changes its leadership wholesale, or Silicon Valley becomes Public Enemy #1. And, unlike Wall Street, it doesn't have the collective social skill to still prosper while being hated.
People, inside and outside of tech, are waking up.