My ’tech hot take’ was featured in an MKBHD video this week, to the tune of 2.3 million views at the point of writing this post.
Although he didn’t talk about my tweet - it was featured in the beginning as a ’worst take’. However, with the magic of the internet, I get to respond to a take that was never discussed.
My tweet was as follows:
Tech peaked in the early 2010's
Hilariously, I feel as if I misspoke (mis-tweeted?).
Tech really peaked in the late 2000’s.
Perhaps if I had said this Marques would have delved into my take.
I understand that as a ’tech Youtuber’ he is around the latest and greatest technologies, and there is great advancement in the space. I was not discussing ’advancement’ - rather what I was taking was a philosophical stance on technology - when it ceased to serve and aid us. Conversely tech began to lead the vast majority of people into technology-addiction, anxiety, and mental health problems.
The downfall of technology, or when it started hindering the human race can be traced back to a couple things; social media and the iPhone. Ever since the advent of these two things, we have been more and more reliant on tech, and the advancement keeps going - but I feel as if we are not asking the ’why’ of this advancement and just doing it for the sake of doing it. “Because we can” should never be a reason for doing something, but it has been the war cry of the last decade of technological advancement.
I remember going out on the town in ~2011 and people were not enthralled with their phones. But, every year since then has been more and more people looking down instead of up. Social media by itself is not such a terrible idea - if you use it to keep up to date with friends and in contact with people from the world over.
It was the smartphone that permitted the addictive use of social media, where everything became clout chasing, constant updates, and distraction. Notifications are perhaps the greatest evil to ever grace humanity, and have stolen more hours of productivity than anything else.
If I had to pin-point the downfall, it was June 29th, 2007 - the public release of the iPhone.
While it took years for people to adopt and jump on the smartphone bandwagon, as internet speeds increased from 3G to 4G, it was inevitable the adoption of the smartphone would bring our collective online time into the stratosphere. We are now perpetually, without fail, online and connected. I don’t believe it is possible to put the genie back in the bottle now. Most of us would rather not - people would rather lose a limb than their jack into the internet.
I don’t know if this is the best thing in the world for the vast majority of humans. We should be able to disconnect and have no fear we are missing out. We should have technologies that make our lives better rather than simply more convenient.
Now, it takes great willpower and purposeful use of our technologies so as not to be taken over by them. We as little people are fighting against massive marketing and psychological efforts to keep us in front of our phones just a little bit longer so we can consume the next ad for something we absolutely never needed in the first place.
I digress.
We already live in the cyberpunk dystopia, we are just missing the aesthetic.
