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What If Disruption Was Just A Tech Con Game?

October 23, 2018 by Douglas McLennan 2 Comments

The tide has turned on the tech revolution. Over the past year the breathless articles that used to accompany new tech innovations have dried up, replaced with dystopian concerns about the Dark Web, privacy, hacking, fake news, and the deadening and manipulative effects of social media addiction.

Tech was going to disrupt everything:

Even after the word lost its meaning from overuse, it still suffused our understanding of why the ground beneath our feet felt so shaky. They tried to freak us out and we believed them. Why wouldn’t we? Their products were dazzling, sci-fi magic come to life. They transformed our days, our hours, our interior life. Fear of being stranded on “the wrong side,” in turn, primed us to look to these world-beating companies to understand what comes next.

It is only now, a decade after the financial crisis, that the American public seems to appreciate that what we thought was disruption worked more like extraction—of our data, our attention, our time, our creativity, our content, our DNA, our homes, our cities, our relationships. The tech visionaries’ predictions did not usher us into the future, but rather a future where they are kings.

You could see it coming. Lonely voices in the beginning – Evgeny Morozov, Jaron Lanier, then Nicholas Carr,  Franklin Foer and others. Now it’s become an industry.

Teens are not getting on Facebook, for the first time social media use is flattening or declining, and 42 percent of Facebook users said they took a break from the platform at least for a while in the past year. Pew reports that a growing number of those surveyed say they wouldn’t find it hard to give up social media.

We all got addicted to free services on the web, not realizing that there wasn’t anything free about them, that our behavior, the data we generated while using the services, was actually the ultimate product. It’s not actually as diabolical as it seems. We’ve watched “free” TV and subsidized newspapers for years. But tech just found a more sophisticated way of being able to take advantage of it. DNA testing services and genealogy sites that are cheap to use aren’t actually making a living off your purchases of their services; they’re collecting your data and selling databases to their true clients.

Tech business models fooled us into thinking we were the client, when in fact we were the product.

So what to do about it? Look at the products you use and decide whether you care or not. Social media has changed how we think about privacy, and you might not care. On the other hand, if you’ve just had your credit cards exposed in a hack or you’re the victim of identity theft or you’re depressed because social media distraction has dulled your senses, you might.

And meanwhile, on a bigger scale, the everything-wants-to-be-free ethos has ruined a lot of business models that support culture. WIth a new skepticism about tech disruption, we’re starting to see some industries – like music and publishing  and newspapers – start to figure out how to get past this. But it’s going to take a while.

Image: Pixabay

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Filed Under: arts & tech

Comments

  1. Jam says

    October 23, 2018 at 1:18 pm

    I understand that Kindles, Kobos and Nooks are also dropping off with many returning to real tangible books, to read, mark up, share, etc.
    Humans love new toys… in the 40s/50/s it was time saving devices that promised us untold free time. This is another round for shiny things that promise everything but don’t deliver. We will continue to chase this tail…. because it’s interesting and fun. It’s not just America … it’s humanity. Social Media is anything but.

    Reply
  2. CoolWriter says

    January 2, 2019 at 4:23 am

    Netflix is ​​a good example of how rapidly changing technologies can strike even a very advanced business project, tightly tied to these very high technologies. Netflix, since its inception in 1997, has been developing technologies for streaming video broadcasting, and since 1999, has had its own Internet service for selling streaming multimedia content using the Video on Demand scheme, it has made a fatal mistake, concentrating its main efforts on DVD rental at a time when other technologies replaced Netflix DVDs almost collapsed. This will show how important it is to keep up with the times, and what they are doing now is a pathetic attempt to stop or delay the development so that they don’t go bankrupt themselves

    Reply

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Douglas McLennan

I’m the founder and editor of ArtsJournal, which was founded in September 1999 and aggregates arts and culture news from all over the internet. The site is also home to some 60 arts bloggers. I’m a … [Read More...]

About diacritical

Our culture is undergoing profound changes. Our expectations for what culture can (or should) do for us are changing. Relationships between those who make and distribute culture and those who consume it are changing. And our definitions of what artists are, how they work, and how we access them and their work are changing. So... [Read more]

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Recent Comments

  • Margy Waller on Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea: “THIS x — I’ve been wanting this so much. We need a think tank — or a think tank with…” Sep 10, 12:28
  • Franklin on Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea: “William, Ahem, so where’s our Dutch Golden Age? We’re to take such narrowly viewed and decontextualized anomalies as a norm?…” Sep 2, 07:52
  • william osborne on Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea: “Ahem, so where’s our Dutch Golden Age? We’re to take such narrowly viewed and decontextualized anomalies as a norm? It’s…” Sep 1, 06:13
  • Franklin on Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea: “I agree with Douglas that public arts funding is too politically fraught in the United States to grow it to…” Aug 31, 11:55
  • william osborne on Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea: “About “static models.” Private funding systems are sometimes promoted exactly because they are thought to be more flexible than public…” Aug 30, 15:56
  • william osborne on Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea: “Douglas comments that our current private funding model “no longer works as it was intended, so we need to rethink.”…” Aug 30, 15:18
  • Douglas McLennan on Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea: “Franklin – thanks for this. Very useful. A few things – your example of the movies – the creative side…” Aug 30, 12:28
  • Douglas McLennan on Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea: “Earl: This is a whole different topic of course, but one I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I…” Aug 30, 08:41
  • Franklin on Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea: “Sorry, “in conjunction with one another” in the first paragraph, and not really influence peddling in the last one, but…” Aug 30, 04:25
  • Earl G. Blackburn on Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea: “Douglas, I can’t thank you enough for this post. I’ve been working on a new model of executing management for…” Aug 29, 21:46

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