Why I am optimistic again
When I became disenchanted with technology in 2018, it shattered a mythology I'd spent my 20s immersed in. It took a while to find a reason to be excited again.
When I became disenchanted with technology in the spring of 2018, it shattered the mythology that I had spent my 20s immersed in.
Technology was extremely meaningful to me: a curious & super-powered primitive to allow us to explore the depths of the collective unconscious by skillfully interfacing human & machine. And yet I found myself in San Francisco: supposedly the global center of innovation, caught day-to-day in the mundanity of a large corporation & doing anything but inventing.
Looking around, the picture was bleak: at some point between 2011 and 2017 it felt like every exciting & scrappy early-stage startup in the Bay Area became subsumed by a corporate surveillance-technology company: every bright-eyed inventor I knew eventually spending 3 hours/day on a shuttle bus to be sad in meetings at a suburban office park.