In the talk about cybercrime, it’s not often asked whether it was wise to make many of the social…

In the talk about cybercrime, it’s not often asked whether it was wise to make many of the social transactions that are now being criminalised online transactions in the first place. Societies operate on trust, generated by hierarchy, generated by conformity. /1

Apple sort of got that from the start, but much of the rest of the IT industry was in such a headlong rush to disintermediate existing social transactions that the function of society itself is now beholden to their flimsy and complex products. /2

Buying IT should be like buying a washing machine, you take it home, plug it in, and turn it on. No training needed. That’s obviously aspirational for IT, but the underlying principle of targeting the social transaction rather than trying to replace…/3

…it with a monetised IT version dependent upon your product is sound. There are so many examples of the opposite. Filing, for example - records. The absolute cornerstone of organisational competence. Done astoundingly badly by maybe the majority of organisations. /4

They outsource it to software, as they do many other business processes now, relying upon the software to almost entirely run entire business functions. It never works, they ditched the filing clerks whose job it was to make sure these things happened properly. /5

They replaced a social transaction with a third party transaction, now dependent upon the vendor’s product, which has all the bells and whistles, but which most people don’t know how to use, if they had the time anyway. /6

As Douglas Adams said, if you’re calling it a ‘technology’, you’ve already failed. It’s a social transaction, not a technology. So many IT products are like consultants, paid to come into your organisation and tell you the time off your own watch. /7

All of the delicate ecology of trust in social environments, including businesses, replaced with a parasitic relationship with software and hardware suppliers. IT needn’t be like this. But it will be, while it ignores that everything is 100% social. Transactional. 8/8