My fear—or maybe it’s better written, as “my lament”?—is that for every made-it-big tech person who represents the worst of avarice and greed, there is a sea of regular tech people who are being ground up by the works. Countless pasty faces staring at screens, drinking diet soda, trying to live in the bites of life they can grab after hours, (taking their phone so they can be summoned, of course!) stressed-out, burnt-out…

So when I hear people talk about “tech people” as if we’ve collectively done something wrong and messed up the world, I look around and all I see are people who’ve been broken and smashed. The grass is no greener on the inside-tech side of the fence. To everyone outside-tech, what gets done inside tech is magic—it’s not, it’s factory work, round two.

I don’t mean this as a repost to what people say when they lament what has happened to the world, but as a commiserating plea: “Yes! Yes! The problem is everywhere.”

ɕ