Maybe the greatest enabler of social breakdown we’re now living is the IT industry. Not much is said about…

Maybe the greatest enabler of social breakdown we’re now living is the IT industry. Not much is said about it. As social systems have been degraded through decades of individually-focused politics, rushing to fill the void left by that destruction has invariably been IT. /1 https://t.co/hoZ0QkUPll

And in fact that’s also in some ways putting the cart before the horse. Because that industry is one of the champions of that degradation, much of the ‘Silicon Valley’ expansion in the past half century has been deliberately aimed at replacing our social structures. /2 https://t.co/I8eJ4kwKYu

So many of the ‘tech giant’ innovations of the past 50+ years were launched with utopian aims. The technology was almost incidental to the wider social project these giants had in mind, of remaking society. ‘Disruption’ has always been the banner under which this ‘innovation’…/3

…has been launched. Of course the invention of printing and books massively disrupted society centuries ago, all new communications technologies do. So we’ve been here before. Information is an ecosystem in a society, as much as food and transport and housing is. /4

But as always, when you hear words like disruption and innovation, always look for somebody trying to get rich, by supplanting somebody else who is already rich. And the great IT revolution gave certain individuals wealth on an unprecedented scale. Richer than entire nations. /5 https://t.co/2n2vQhrr57

Which happened with printing too, no doubt. But at least there the shift was absorbed fairly quickly into social institutions, who took that new technology and made it work for them. They already had print/texts, prior to mass printing, they knew what to do with it. /6

Returning to my original graphic, the ACSC Annual Cyber Threat Report 2020–21 (https://t.co/NeDEal74l9). Read along that bottom axis, the institutions most under assault from cybersecurity threats. Key institutions to running our societies. Cybersecurity is growing at an…/7 https://t.co/LJFNWI2yby

…alarming rate, and it’s inevitable given the profoundly libertarian worldviews that surrounded the creation of the technologies themselves. If you launch technology with social disruption front of mind, you will get social disruption. /8 https://t.co/zgcCacn0Z7

Perversely, the laughably bad security built into IT systems over the past 50 years makes the industry even richer, selling cybersecurity solutions. Capitalising on the rubbish they’ve created. The industry has always been contemptuous of the user,…/9 https://t.co/hvHLmLNTb7

…often called the ‘l-user’ by IT support staff. The whole philosophy and culture of IT is about disrupting everybody, and Steve Jobs made Apple’s fortune by reacting to that. As Douglas Adams said, if you’re calling something a ‘technology’, you’ve already failed. /10

It should be something that ‘just works’, seamlessly. Like a traffic light. Or washing machine. But there’s many more billions to be made by disruption, by destroying social institutions and replacing them with technologies owned by you, the tech billionaire. /11

You corral that entire social, complex ecosystem through your product, and monetise us as we go through the turnstiles. Social media the same, built on a laughable philosophy of ‘the people’ driving societies, under cover of more laughable politics of ‘free speech’. /12

Every day we come here, to try to mobilise some of our societies back. But these same technologies actively mobilise their destruction, much faster than we could ever mobilise a counter-offensive. /end