Growing techlash is long overdue
One of the more surprising stories to hit the headlines in the last year is growing opposition to data centres. Not that it is particularly shocking that people object to giant industrial buildings being built near their homes, but it is novel to see opposition grow not only across the world but also across the political spectrum.
Residents of a village in Scotland are only the latest to object, and while day-to-day concerns are at the forefront of complaints, it would be foolish to fail to note that the pushback is coming at a time when Internet businesses in general are looked at with scepticism.
An inherently boring, but nonetheless important, industry sector, data centres have become a business driven by little more than speculation. Noisy, ugly and consuming absurd amounts of power and water, these silicon sheds have been transformed into an asset bubble that threatens not only local economies but the economy as a whole.
Self-evidently, though, data centres are also a physical manifestation of the (not at all post-material) Internet. As a result, the growing rejection is arguably as much a rejection of the antics of what we refer to, increasingly inaccurately, as technology companies.
At the same time, the industry is furiously firing out missives, issuing manifestos on how they are making the world a better place.
Taken together, these manifestos amount to little more than Pollyannaish waffle about how artificial intelligence (AI) will solve problems from world hunger to drug discovery, and maybe even tuck us into bed at night.
Readers will be aware that gee-whizz technobabble makes my skin crawl, but it is worth pausing to ask why are business executives penning these screeds. Business manifestos are never a good sign. Businesses claiming to have social missions typically turn out to be either picking people’s pockets or simply reveal themselves to run on hubris, rent-seeking and special pleading.
Manifestos are, in short, a category error. Businesses do not have missions other than this: make money. A business or industry can change the world, sometimes even for the better, but they are not art movements or political organisations. Or at least, they shouldn’t be.
Besides, today’s crop of tech ‘leaders’ don’t exactly have the stature of Ken Olsen.
Leaders we deserve
Olsen, founder of the late, lamented Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), was known for his humanistic approach to business, including hiring women (something the industry as a whole still struggles with, despite, until recently at least, getting up early in the morning to find more time to talk about it), supporting family life and work-life balance, and setting up a credit union so that staff excluded by the banking system due to discrimination could get mortgages. For all I know he may have written a manifesto, but I doubt it. What he did do is get on with the business of being in business while trying to not lay waste to society while he was doing it.
As an aside, once Olsen was given his walking papers by the board, DEC was slowly stripped apart and its corpse sold to the less lamentably late Compaq, itself arguably once innovative (a bit, anyway) but by then one of the least inspiring assemblers of plastic tubs known to man.
Tech today is even less inspiring than businesses banging out beige boxes. Even calling it information technology is something of a stretch, and, certainly, much of it has precious little to do with computing. Genuine innovation has been replaced by extractive strategies, lock-in and a raft of products nobody wants.
Compared to today’s outfits, companies that chucked a few electronic components into a plastic box seem not only charming innocents, but infinitely more useful to society as a whole.
Today, having not had a deleterious effect not only on vast swathes of culture and politics but trust itself, the tech industry is busy ‘enshittifying’ its own products. Little wonder, then, that they are now coughing up 5,000-word rambles about how bad-things-are-good-actually.
Over the decades, the tech sector has brought countless benefits to society. For me, the ability to edit text and share it via e-mail, both utterly quotidian today, were genuinely life-changing. You will have your own examples. My complaints about the decline of operating systems, human-computer interfaces, and native applications, the failure to consider embodiment, and all the rest, may sound like the whinging of someone being left behind by the latest wave of technological change, and perhaps it is, but it is also a response to a technology sector that appears not very interested in helping humans.
In light of this, complaints about data centres and spy glasses seem to be a symptom of a growing sense that tech is off the rails, acting like a colonial master intent on extracting resources from us, its unwilling subjects.
Steve Jobs, himself no saint but undeniably at least partially responsible for the microcomputer revolution, once called the personal computer (or at least his personal computer) a bicycle for the mind. Today’s tech products seem more like e-bikes mounting the footpath and slamming into us at 30 kilometres per hour.
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