Doug Rushkoff is ready to renounce the digital revolution
No real surprise.  A good number of people who have grown up with the promise of the tech are pretty well disgusted by what it&#x27;s turned out to deliver, which is mostly &quot;A handful of multibillionaires treating the rest of us as sets of eyeballs to be monetized at all possible costs.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m certainly there.  I grew up with the promises of the internet, and I have to agree with Doctorow about &quot;Enshitification.&quot;  Most of the promised stuff has turned out to have some pretty nasty side effects and consequences.  Turns out, humans don&#x27;t scale to a global conversation very well, and <i>especially</i> not when your goal there turns into &quot;ensuring they see as much of the platform as possible to view your ads.&quot;<p>That&#x27;s before getting into the fact that we can&#x27;t trust computers in the slightest, because they&#x27;re too complex for even the people who make them to reason about, and our software is a hot mess - but, hey, we have tools to bring in all 2700 un-audited dependencies for the Electron app!  Hey, where&#x27;d my crypto wallet contents go?  Huh.  Find someone who&#x27;s done computer security for long, and they&#x27;ll either be a weird off grid prepper or be planning for something of the sort, with nothing more complex than a microcontroller or two.<p>We&#x27;ve tried, for north of a decade, and with a solid couple years of effort, to build human interaction with various forms of consumer tech intermediating all the interactions, and it&#x27;s been an unmitigated disaster in no shortage of ways (David Sax&#x27;s book The Future is Analog is a good survey of the topic).  I&#x27;ve been having good results lately returning to analog human interaction around a campfire on a regular basis.<p>That&#x27;s before you get into the slave labor, near slave labor, and &quot;I Can&#x27;t Believe It&#x27;s Not Slave Labor&quot; that goes into pretty much <i>all</i> our modern devices - from the cobalt on up (Cobalt Red by Kara is a good read here, Dying for an iPhone is relevant, and there&#x27;s no shortage of others).  It&#x27;s nasty, and behind every promise to do better seems to be some mechanism or another to further obfuscate the human labor going into the modern short lived electronics (because, of course, long lived devices are bad for profit).<p>So, yeah.  Good for him.  The tech thing has rotted.  Let&#x27;s try something different.