Notes on "Exhaust Ports" by Jon Gold

https://jon.gold/2018/02/exhaust-ports/

Time is the only thing that is scarce, and those greedy corporations know it, because they’re each striving to own every second of our lives. And somehow, we don’t see the compromise we’ve been tricked into making. Each of us has twenty four hours in a day, and only a finite number of days in our lives. And we check our phone tens or hundreds of times per day. Every thought, hope, dream, punctuated by pings. Every moment genuinely well spent is interrupted by our nagging anxiety to see what’s happening somewhere else.

The bluesman Robert Johnson was said to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his guitar playing prowess: at least he got a good deal out of it. We sold years of our lives to billionaire tech entrepreneurs, and in return we got depression.

There’s an opportunity cost associated with the smartest people working on these technologies and the financial bubble that has risen in concert with them. The world is full of pressing issues that we desperately need to allocate resources to, and each thing that someone builds or funds that harms us is a waste of energy that could be used to fix non-trivial issues. To take a random, non-weighted sample of examples I’ve been thinking about this week: there are 7000 people sleeping on the streets of San Francisco, and 45 million Americans living below the poverty line. 5 trillion pieces of plastic are floating in the Pacific, and by 2050 perhaps 200 million or 1 billion people will be displaced by climate change. At the time of writing, Flint, Michigan hasn’t had clean drinking water for 1391 days.

It’s imperative that we remove these companies from the pedestal we’ve placed them on. They’re not to be aspired to.

Common feedback to my criticism of Twitter & Facebook is that they are just businesses responding to what the market is currently rewarding. I agree, and the market is rotten.

tracking time-spent as an organizational goal rather than embarrassment; the presumable moneymaker of selling personal data or showing adverts; funding it all with obscene amounts of money that could be used to really save the world.

“But Jon, it’s not just social media, it’s TV and advertising and everything else too” — I agree. Advertising is equally repulsive. We’re destroying the planet, and advertising is an accelerant, and the list of exceptions to this are vanishingly small.

I’m still in love with technology, but increasingly with nuance into that which is for us, and that which productizes us.