Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable
Was talking about this with a friend today, and I think this incident highlights why I sometimes get really depressed about my career and technology.<p>I&#x27;m a Gen X-er, and I started my career in the late 90s. Before that I was a ham radio operator in junior high and HS (back when they had Morse code tests!). I remember the heady euphoria around the Internet then, and the vision of &quot;tech utopia&quot; was certainly the dominant one: the Internet would bring a &quot;democratization of information&quot; where anyone with a computer could connect to the Internet, publish a website, and communicate with people across the world. Really cool new services came online frequently. I still remember the first time I used Google, and at the time I was blown away by how good it was (&quot;like magic!&quot; I said) because the results were so much better than other search engines of the time.<p>But these days, the older I get the more and more I feel like tech is having a negative impact on both society at large and me personally. In the 90s we all thought the Internet would lead to a <i>decentralization</i> of power, but literally the exact opposite happened. Sure, telcos sucked, but there were tons of them spread across all corners of the globe. Now there is 1 single megacorp that a sizable portion of humanity depends on for phone&#x2F;text communication.<p>It just makes me sad. Sure, there are pluses to tech I&#x27;m ignoring here, but I just think that how reality turned out <i>so</i> 180 from the expectations of the late 90s is what really hurts.