The switch from profit to Share Value in the 80s accounts for the superficiality of our tech "achievements". When a company has to satisfy customers it focuses on quality and slow improvement. VCs and LBOs want pure share value, no products or employees or profit. This trend will probably reverse now that QE/ZIRP is done.
I don't know what caused the lower quality in literature. I stopped reading new fiction in the '90s after a steady pattern of Gotchas, where the author started out on an solid story then switched abruptly to pure partisan politics. Could be a positive feedback loop where SOME authors started playing this game, and then the readers who wanted something better stopped buying books, so the only motivation to publish was to satisfy the Gotcha-lovers.
iPhones getting better while the rest of the world gets worse can hardly be described as the inexorable upward march of progress. We need so much more imagination.
Ugh, thank you. I am still extremely saddened that so much of our world's best and brightest have been devoting all of their talent and energy into making... better iterations of the iphone. So much potential, wasted.
Nice short piece on the current state of the "technoscience" worldview. Definitely gonna read the entire article that this is excerpted from when I have some time.
The switch from profit to Share Value in the 80s accounts for the superficiality of our tech "achievements". When a company has to satisfy customers it focuses on quality and slow improvement. VCs and LBOs want pure share value, no products or employees or profit. This trend will probably reverse now that QE/ZIRP is done.
I don't know what caused the lower quality in literature. I stopped reading new fiction in the '90s after a steady pattern of Gotchas, where the author started out on an solid story then switched abruptly to pure partisan politics. Could be a positive feedback loop where SOME authors started playing this game, and then the readers who wanted something better stopped buying books, so the only motivation to publish was to satisfy the Gotcha-lovers.
Terrific article really.
iPhones getting better while the rest of the world gets worse can hardly be described as the inexorable upward march of progress. We need so much more imagination.
Ugh, thank you. I am still extremely saddened that so much of our world's best and brightest have been devoting all of their talent and energy into making... better iterations of the iphone. So much potential, wasted.
Nice short piece on the current state of the "technoscience" worldview. Definitely gonna read the entire article that this is excerpted from when I have some time.