“The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.”
Tim-Berners Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web
I’ve written before about the need for us to start seeing and engaging with technology beyond the obvious knee-jerk of ‘lets make an app that aggregates this specific offline activity’.
My issue with the zomato-ization of the world is that one: they’re usually very bad practicioners of the craft of empathy. Furthermore, there’s a certain thought process to most of these start-ups that ensures that this is the only thing we’ll ever see from them…
Business Models. Most start-ups need to show the 10x-ability of their idea in a given market. Therefore, Uber isn’t really in the ride-sharing business they’re in the business of taking a cut of your ride fare. Zomato isn’t in the food delivery business they’re in the business of taking a cut of your food bill.
“It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.”
Clive James
It would be nice to think that start-ups all over the world want to make the world a better place with ease of access and lightning fast service but in reality it seems like they’re mostly asking, “People are spending money in x place, how can I take a cut.”
Now you could say-
“but Uber is making taxis safer, cleaner and more dependable!”
No, they aren’t. They’re shitty to drivers, they’re shitty to riders and they’re causing more cars to be sold and thus contributing enormously not just to urban congestion but climate change as a whole.
“Zomato lets me order a milkshake at 2AM!”
… How is that a good thing? Zomato routinely abuses it’s workers, it forces restaurants to undercut themselves and given our proclivity for sweet cravings post-midnight, will be the leading enabler of diabetes soon enough.
I could go on but I think I’ve made my point. Start-ups are bound by Economic Models that ensure that they’re in the business of figuring out new and innovative ways to take your money by implementing tired technological solutions that would make more sense in a work of dystopian science fiction than our daily lives.
What should we do instead? Like most things, there’s an Obvious answer and a Non-Obvious one.
Obvious Answer
“Technology is best when it brings people together.”
Matt Mullenweg, Creator of Wordpress
Technology that attempts to digitize inefficient IRL activities needs to be more conscious of what makes a specific activity problematic in real life. We aren’t talking about automating tasks anymore…
We’re talking about automating social relationships and with that comes the effective class barriers and social issues that plague society. Who are the people that are most incentivized to become uber drivers, who are the people most incentivized to becoming zomato delivery partners? It isn’t an employment boom we’re celebrating here, it’s a horrific allowance of shitty working conditions because profit-margins need to stay thick in order to justify further investment.
Technology needs to be more mindful of this when integrating solutions. We’re simply digitizing the problems of yesterday into the fabric of the so-called technology of tomorrow.
We want a world that is better than our today, one that is just and equitable. Most importantly we want a world that is kind. The automation solutions of tomorrow will need to enable that if we’re ever going to be able to say that we’ve moved forward as a race.
Now, the…
Non-Obvious Answer
This one is obviously my personal favourite. If you skimmed the section above and came straight to this, I salute you. We can be friends. If not… Well, maybe next time.
Here’s the real answer, according to me: technology needs to reimagine social life and create mechanisms to allow it to flourish.
What do I mean by this?
Here’s an example of how this isn’t done today:
Social Media websites take the social experience and puts it online. Facebook took the college experience, Instagram took the experience of showing a photo album to your friends and twitter took the shouting opinions in public experience and digitized it.
We see fairly similar analogues for the things we do in real life on these websites. On facebook I can add friends, showcase my relationship status, share an article I just read and see who liked the article and who commented with something to say. Instagram is the same, I take a photo or a video and have the burning desire to share it with the people I love, or more commonly today, strangers and they can tell me if they liked it or comment on the post. Twitter, lest I sound redundant, is the same.
One could say that thyese are effective expressions of real life online sans the intricacies but nonetheless... What they’re missing, on the whole, is whether or not life should be this way.
Everyday we live with Tim Berners-Lee’s world wide web we have an opportunity to reimagine social life for the better. We have to ask ourselves the hard, but also incredibly liberating, question: Is society functioning the way it’s supposed to right now? Or are we at the receiving end of the whims and fancies of powerful people with no accountability to reign them in?
I believe the latter is true. There just isn’t enough of an understanding in people today with regard to the fact that if they don’t like how society is currently structured then it’s upto us to change it. Technology is a gateway to that. It’s an enabler of exactly that.
Freedom is an oft-quoted benefit that the gods of capitalism have bestowed upon us. The missionaries and ministers of capitalism would have you believe that, every day they drill it into our heads. But this world, the one we have today, is not free. Or at least not free in the way we’d really like to imagine freedom would be. There’s a clear disconnect here. We have to reimagine freedom.
We need to create mechanisms that reimagine what ‘having a conversation’ outside the bounds of time and space can be. How can that be better than the one way traffic and shouting matches we currently have? Pol.is is an open source tool that is trying to do exactly that and is worth looking into.
We have to imagine a world where the sharing of our lives doesn’t overtake the actual living of it but augments it. BeReal, I think, does this. I’m yet to use it but in principle I can definitely get behind it.
FilmX is an example of a prototype solution that tries to reimagine how we can express our taste in films. I’m currently at work expanding the offerings into a much larger, fleshed out platform, where I wholly intend to build solutions that I believe will offer a solution to some of the issues that plague social media.
If you’d like to be a part of the conversation that builds FilmX 2.0 then drop me a message or comment below, I’m heavily considering starting an ongoing devlog sort of thing where I share updates and have weekly conversations on the issues we’re trying to solve.
My substack is also obviously currently in the middle of a messy rebrand. Forgive me while I make up my mind.
If you found this article helpful or informative, do share it with someone cool. Also, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the stuff! Drop a comment down below and we can chat!