This conviction was so strong, that I decided to study physics, just so that I am not surrounded by nerdy people [sic]. And back in the day, it was that way, kind of. Programming was still an esoteric skill, and required mostly solid understanding of algorithms and logic. Software was often written using text editors or not-that-great and not-that-helpful IDEs (IDE — integrated development environment). To get hooked on that, you needed to be a geek. And by geek I don’t mean a person dressing in funny t-shirts and having a laptop covered in stickers — this term has been hijacked by hipsters and clearly lost most of its original meaning. I mean a real geek — a person having a hobby that consumed a significant amount of time and as a consequence isolated you from your peers. You needed to smart, focused and understand causality of events, what often proves to be not at all helpful when it comes to social interactions.
Computers were widely used but mostly to create PowerPoint presentations for school and watch movies downloaded from torrents. Internet was helpful to search for information, but not much more. In the first year of university, I didn’t have wifi in my student apartment — we used mobile Internet with a simcard, that had terrible reception in most rooms, so using it as a form of entertainment was out of the question. Facebook was still a new thing, I created an account only in 2008 during summer holiday in Cyprus, where people who I met there convinced me that this way we can stay in touch. But it still wasn’t a big deal, we didn’t have smartphones and not being able to stay in touch with your family when you are on holiday abroad was the most normal thing.
Fast forward to 2018, and things look slightly different. Huge demand for software that helps us literally in every aspect of our lives created plenty of jobs in the industry, well paid jobs. And programming is not what it used to be. You still need to be smart, but unless you will be working for some cutting edge project in Google or another tech giant, you do not need to be a genious and your job will be much more high level. As there is a lot of money pumped into the tech industry, you will probably be quite well off and rarely struggling to find jobs. If you are lucky, you might even be able to create a chat application that will be bought for billions of dollars by your competitor, as it happened with Whatsapp.
We are tempted to think of those IT gurus as friendly shy guys with great ideas and (at least) good will. “Don’t be evil” — states the motto of Google. We trust them, because of their casual t-shirts and informal way of speaking. They are our buddies, that build cool things using awesome technologies. But we should be cautious with this snap judgement.
It seems more and more that in terms of the influence they have on the world, they resemble bankers more than anything else. As it is hard to imagine not having a bank account, it is harder and harder to live without an e-mail, social media account or smartphone. As we pay banks to keep our money, we pay those tech companies to keep us connected to the world. We might not always be paying with money, but we are paying. We find ourselves vastly dependent on the platforms they are providing us, with little control over how our data is being handled and what their ultimate goal is. Does anybody still believe that Facebook just “wants to make the world more connected?
As in 2008 housing market crisis the banks were “too big to fall”, now Facebook and Google are “too big to disconnect from”. In theory, we could all delete our accounts today and switch to a different platform and they would collapse! But most of people won’t do it, because they got addicted to the feedback loop and illusion of keeping in touch that the platform provides. So as for banks after 2008 it is business as usual, the same seems to be the case for Facebook after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. We have granted them so much power, that we seem to be powerless even if they do not fulfill our expectations.
I am not saying that everything that those companies do is bad. But I do think that with big money comes influence and power. And those usually lead to a desire to have even more influence and even more power. And we cannot forget that those smart tech people not always see the world the same way most of us does. Sometimes solving the puzzle might turn out to be too tempting to abandon it because of the potential implications. And it is on us to recognize this fact and don’t blindly give our consent to everything they ask. Otherwise we might wake up one day in a different reality.