I’m Coining a Phrase: Tech Flight
Posted on April 24th, 2014 in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Yesterday the Mets pitcher Matt Harvey announced that he was giving up Twitter after his team scolded him for posting a picture of himself making an obscene gesture. (What do you expect? He’s a Met.) The University of South Florida has asked its graduating students to stop taking selfies while accepting their diplomas. Perhaps the most enthusiastic supporter of Google Glass has just announced that he’s giving it up. And one of the world’s smartest hedge fund managers, David Einhorn, has just declared that he sees another tech bubble due to an irrational support for “cool kid” stocks.
Tech Flight: The phenomenon of adopting a new tech fad for a brief time, then realizing that it really doesn’t make your life more meaningful or better, and giving it up.
Of course, there are plenty of trends in the opposite direction. More than not, I would imagine. Facebooks’ profits tripled in the last quarter! (But does anyone really get excited about Facebook anymore! I check it by habit, but find it less and less interesting.)
What I’m suggesting is that we come to a more nuanced cultural understanding of tech innovation in which we don’t automatically assume the universal adoption of some new digital platform or innovation, with attendant panic about everything else. For example: Yes, some forms of journalism will work well online; no, not all forms of print will go extinct. Yes, Twitter will be useful for some things. No, there’s no particular reason for most people to Tweet.
And so on.
The real tech bubble that we need to pop here is not so much the stocks; a lot of the stocks in question aren’t widely held by retail investors, and if they did plummet, the economic impact would be much more limited than in 2000.
The bubble we need to pop is actually the mindless genuflecting toward the cultural power of Silicon Valley 20-somethings. As smart as these guys are, most of them can’t speak another language, have never read a poem or studied a painting, don’t know anything about faith, and just aren’t very mature—for all their technical skill, their understanding of the world is limited. (Binary, you might say.) And yet, we have afforded them a kind of cultural hegemony solely because they work in a field that most of us don’t understand and make huge sums of money doing so.
Tech flight: It’s a real thing, in my opinion, and it’s going to get more widespread. Not that people will become Luddites, mind you. But they’ll feel increasingly comfortable with picking and choosing what tech advances they want to participate in, and not worrying so much about the rest. “You know what? it’s okay if I don’t give a damn about Pinterest.” We have lives to lead, and they won’t always revolve around our interactions with smartphones and computers.
Now, if only we could do something abut those people who walk down the street and text at the same time….