Who Will Be The Ultimate Overlord And Rule Society Forever: Tech vs Gov
Lately, it just seems like the entire week has been politically charged, and yes technology was affected too, well not technological infrastructure or engineering, of course, just socio-techy things you know. But then again, where there’s humans, chaos ensues.
Yes, yes, I am talking about President Donald Trump & virtually every social media giant blocking him from their platforms despite him being the former President of the United States, and oh, by the way I have unexplainable, mixed feelings about that. No, not Donald Trump per say, just maybe, tech companies having more power than government officials, and just regular human beings.
Even though Trump is indeed the former leader, and is going through not his first, but his second impeachment right now….What does this grandiose display of power mean… I mean, is this a show off? Are ‘Tech Dudes’ flexing their muscles against Political Chauvinists or something? That’s a question for another day, because, if you recall, there are some marginalized groups that have been banned from popular social media before, years prior, but because they were (are) considered deplorable, nobody, besides the affected parties cared.
Anyways, besides all of social media banning Donald Trump, one social media company, Parler got banned from AWS for not banning Trump. AWS is Amazon Web Services, the leading Cloud Computing Provider (well that’s mostly according to them) for those of you who don’t know. Once again, this isn’t really about Donald Trump, but, a tech giant like AWS displaying its power like that… What does it honestly mean, for us regular Joes & Janes?
Are they setting a precedent? One wrong move and you’re out, even if you have millions of supporters and have contributed to their success? I think our social capital and monetary capital means nothing to them anymore, because, they are controlling a whole lot of infrastructure, and have access to all forms of data… And they are worth millions, billions & trillions of dollars.
Speaking of data, and more tech drama: WhatsApp Policy Update…what’s that all about anyway? I would sincerely like to delve into it, you can move to Telegram or Signal, all you want, but I am pretty sure Facebook can acquire Telegram & shut down Signal if they really wanted to…
Honestly, most of these apps have sketchy data collection policies, just save yourself by purchasing a cellphone that has no access to internet and start making phone calls & send SMSs like it’s 2006, because your data will be collected and it will be used to send personalized ads and recommend you to people you’re trying to block, as long as you’re on the internet.
With the current events in Tech, I do fear that we might be heading towards a very sickening dystopia. Honestly, if it weren’t for Capitalism & Historical Systems, none of this Donald Trump and his hate speech aficionado would be happening. Technology would have made the world much more beautiful, but alas, here we are.
On a more positive note, lets end of this post with a quote:
“The biggest vulnerability in any organization are humans. I’m not prejudiced against humans, some of my best friends are humans, but human beings have no business deploying infrastructure [when compared to AWS CloudFormation]. There are too many ways smart people can make mistakes. The “s’mart” part is irrelevant, it is the “people” part that will always let you down.” Blaine Sundrud — Senior AWS Instructional Designer
