Tech, Disrupted
Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum, according to Om Malik, whom we know personally (although it’s been a while) and for whom we’ve always had great respect, and who, in our opinion, was being kind, or at least diplomatic. “There is a new economic system emerging that is based on consumer capitalism, that innovates ways to eliminate friction of consumption — goods, services, and more than anything else, content — but is doing everything it can to diminish the consumer’s ability to afford the consumption,” says Malik. In explaining the results of the Presidential election (which shocked the tech sector and which we are not going to get into), said Malik, “Globalization is a proxy for technology-powered capitalism, which tends to reward fewer and fewer members of society.”
Tech loves to disrupt and disintermediate. At the same time, it disenfranchises, and people noticed. Except for those people in the tech bubble, and note that he did not say ‘problem:’ he said ‘vacuum.’ They’ve clearly dissociated from the world outside of their monoculture – a word often associated with Silicon Valley, although ‘cultural hegemony’ might be a bit more accurate, but we’ll let that one sit.
Tech’s language bubble may be part of the problem: It might help if we stop referring to people who utilize tech as users or the product and remember that they’re the customers, plain and simple, whether the product itself is free or not. Whether it’s investors or advertisers who are paying the bills, it’s still about eyeballs, which are almost always attached to people/customers, who are ultimately the reason why someone is paying your bills.