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As my regular readers are painfully aware, I feel a lot of the world is awash in bullshit, and the technology world triply so. We’re sold products we don’t need, that don’t do what we want, from companies who will then collapse and be sold off for parts. Meanwhile too much of the media celebrates innovations that basically burn money and forests while delivering nothing but stock prices. And if you think you know what I’m talking about, once again don’t be so sure, I have a long list of grievances.
And I wonder how much does this stuff cost us? I’m not just talking money, but time, social damage, environmental damage, and having to clean up after it all falls apart.
I think it’s hard to measure because a lot of the economic bullshit is now a loop.
Investors invest in each other and the people they know to get a return, even if a service won’t provide anything. Media breathlessly starts a hype cycle about nothing, and will do it again weeks or months later having learned little. Bookkeeping flummery keeps the real costs off of the books and out of view. Environmental impact is exported. There’s a giant cycle that occupies a lot of time and resources to keep people from asking what time and resources are being consumed.
And we do it all over again repeatedly and more rapidly.
We can’t measure costs of all this meaninglessness as it moves too fast, doesn’t have enough data, because of made-up data, and because we’ll do it all again anyway. We know there’s bullshit in the economy, but we can’t penetrate the veil of it to figure what it costs us until the bill becomes due the hard way.
It’s enough to make you wish you could yell “stop” and we’d all just stop inventing stuff for ten years so we could pick up the pieces and see how much people were lying. And yes, I thought about how long that freeze should be.
I have the unsettling feeling that an enormous amount of our economy is waste that yields little more than line go up for a tiny amount of people. But I’d like if we could pause and find out.
Pause voluntarily, that is. Judging by the way our climate is changing, we’re gonna get a pretty hard pause involuntarily.
Steven Savage