Tech, What The Heck
The Kick Off: Who Gets To Do Tech, Part I
Digital Technology is everywhere.
It’s in our pockets, on our wrists, and even in some people’s brains. Our pets have it under their skin. It’s all around us—in the streets, in our homes, and in every aspect of our lives. This integration changes how we behave, organise ourselves, and work. We’re seeing a wave of new trends taking over—blockchain, the metaverse, crypto, platforms, and right now, generative AI is stealing the spotlight. But how do we make sense of all this?
What The Heck is going on? What’s truly important, and what’s just noise? How do these trends impact our lives, and more importantly, how can we get involved? How do we decide what is right in this ever changing landscape? These are the questions we’re exploring at the “Tech, What The Heck” meet-ups. The summer series spans July and August 2024 in Amsterdam, with sessions occurring every two weeks.
We’re here to break down the latest in the tech world, what it means for all of us, and how we can help shape the future of tech. Most importantly, we are here to learn from one another. Join us if you’re in the neighbourhood!
Our Kick-Off Meet-Up: Who Gets To Do Tech
This summary is crafted to capture the essence of the session last week, immortalising its vibe online and giving those who couldn’t attend a glimpse of what to expect next time.
We’re lucky to live in an era where digital tech lets us connect and find our tribe, and they can find us too 🔗. On July 3rd, we kicked off our first session in Amsterdam Bijlmer with a group of 12, and let me tell you, the vibes were off the charts. Ron and Peet got things started, and if you don’t know them, check out their podcast “It’s Just A Model”. That’s all you need to get a feel for the incredible energy they brought to the room ✨.
Ron is a Futuring Architect with a compelling, positive, and inviting vision of the future of tech, while Peet is a Strategist with a killer design and tech background. They set the scene with a touch of dark flair, detailing what they call Tech’s Midlife Crisis. Then, we delved into AI as the Peak Digital, illuminating where we stand now. It was a bit of a downer, seeing the internet flooded with bizarre stuff.
But we didn’t want to dwell on the darkness. Instead, we explored how We Need To Rethink Digital, concluding on an optimistic and inspiring note about how You can participate and shape the future of technology.
Let’s dive right in! 🌊
Tech’s Midlife Crisis
Nowadays, technology feels like voodoo, like black magic. We’ve all noticed how the big tech platforms keep enshittifying their participants—the very people who made them what they are. Whether it’s Instagram magically inserting ads into your timeline after you just mentioned a product to a friend, Google burying independent sites by favouring fake ones, or Mr. Beast being terrified that a tweak to the algorithm could destroy his business, it’s clear that something strange is happening.
As Ron put it, “And this is where we are right now. This is voodoo, it’s magic.” To Ron, this feels more like a force of nature, a higher power, not just a business. Is Instagram listening right now? We cannot know. Nobody is sure. With a dictator in power, at least we know who’s in control, but here, we-just-don’t-know.
Where did it all start?
The World Wide Web began as a network for scientists 👩🏻🔬, but it wasn’t long before it was picked up by artists 👩🎨, nerds 🤓, techno wizards 🧙, and all kinds of creative weirdos 😜—creators, people who wanted to make things and share them with the world.
“When images were first introduced, the official World Wide Web people—the scientists—said, ‘We don’t need images, let’s not use them because they will attract the wrong people,’” Ron said. And it’s true, it did attract the wrong kind of people, but that’s exactly why we have the World Wide Web as it is today.
What Ron finds fascinating about the early World Wide Web is that it was a network of creators and the audiences they attracted. People gathered around this weird, new thing and found themselves in the process.
There’s a saying that goes, “Nature abhors a vacuum,” and this internet space quickly got filled. People started building services like PayPal, not within the protocol or network itself, but as separate products. In addition to payment services, identification services started springing up, layering on top of the payment systems. “And you can see how this builds up, how more and more products are built up on the infrastructure for what the infrastructure was lacking,” Ron concluded, highlighting the inevitable path to the platforms we have today.
“Creators, audiences, and the platforms enabling them” sounds too idealistic. We’ve given so much power to the platforms that they now dominate the landscape. The enshittoscene is upon us, with many platforms turning into twiddlers, constantly tweaking their algorithms and treating us as mere products instead of empowering us as creators—the very foundation of human flourishing. Try leaving Amazon as a merchant. Even worse, Amazon forces you to buy ads just to get some traction.
All our networks, all our ecosystems are getting kind of shitty. If you consume your media online, it’s horrible. Instagram is flooded with ads, X and Facebook are swamped with bots and AI-generated content. It used to be great, but now it’s just painful. As Peet remarked, “Where are the people working at these companies getting their content from? Can’t they see that what they make is actually shit? Why can’t they see they’re making a mess out of this world?”
But do they really care?
Personalities of Tech
After Ron walked us through the entire history of the internet, Peet delved into how our perception, behaviour, and use of technology have evolved over time. With every new technology, like the internet, we see the rise of fresh and quirky communities diving in to explore it. These communities are often nerdy and edgy, much like the early hacker communities. “They were like hardcore punk on the internet,” Peet recalled, reminiscing about one he encountered while wandering around a basement in Amsterdam, though he couldn’t quite remember the name.
“These early communities just don’t exist anymore. The people might still be around, but not the initiatives,” Peet added. “We often see this change in behaviour when companies initially need creativity and fluidity in media and production. But once creativity and fluidity are no longer useful, the company knows exactly what they want to make and moves away from those personalities.”
Your initial customers, the innovators, are usually patient with any mishaps or flaws in your product. But as you scale up to a broader audience, these new users have different expectations and zero tolerance for imperfections. At this stage, an organisation needs to be empathetic and sensitive to the customer’s needs. “The personality fades and becomes very bland,” Peet continued. This seems like a natural evolution for many organisations. Once they reach a certain size, their services need to appeal to the masses, causing them to lose their unique character.
“You become faceless; everyone acts the same, no matter what company you enter. Inside the company, it becomes grinding and imposing for the people. In the end—and I hope we won’t reach this point—it might become bland, cold, and poisonous for both the people creating the services and those using them,” Peet concluded. He highlighted that people will always look for better alternatives, and once they find them, your customers are gone.
AI Is Peak Digital
All of this feels like peak poison. How could we let this happen? How is it possible that an AI overview in Google Search suggests gluing the cheese on your pizza to make it stick better when you search for a recipe to prevent cheese from sliding? “So much for Artificial Intelligence,” Ron remarked, baffled by the absurdities he encountered while surfing the internet. Who actually watches the creepy, AI-generated content flooding Facebook? Who is the audience? Who is it made for? What’s up with the bots leaving comments on the AI-generated garbage?
“This is blanding on a community level. It’s like a third-rate school play pretending to be a real community. It’s so obviously bad,” Ron continued. It just doesn’t make any sense. What the heck is going on?
Peet went on to suggest that this feels very much like “an ecosystem of marketers trying to please their managers, rather than ensuring their brand is represented the right way.” He clarified that this isn’t a critique of marketers per se, but rather an observation. “These examples seem like people trying to boost engagement, with no real idea why, but that doesn’t matter to them. They report the numbers, not the actual impact in the real world.”
And he might be right. It’s pretty common to see unhappy employees turning against their employers. Employees who are disengaged at work often put on the appearance of working just to secure the promised rewards. Look, boss, engagement on our platform is at an all-time high. “This is playing into some fabricated internal reality,” Ron added.
The funniest part of this digital peak is that we’re all watching. Every change you make to your services, sooner or later, many people will notice. And every change that doesn’t align with your customers’ needs or desires will backfire on you eventually. Why would you, as Adobe, include poorly AI-generated pictures in your stock photography collection? Who made this decision? “Why? For whom? To whom is this playing to? Really? Is this now the level of 30 years of photography on the World Wide Web? ”, Ron keeps wondering, intrigued by the bold move.
Even Spotify is now full of AI-generated songs and artists. The company is even creating and curating playlists with this artificial content. The internet is buzzing with people trying to cash in on generative AI, often without considering the end user. Who really needs a mug with an AI-generated image, anyway?
Where do we stand now?
Peet used the Adoption Curve to illustrate what’s happening now, even tweaking the curve to match the current landscape. “We can all agree that we’re still very much experimenting. We don’t know what it is. It’s a technology that we are trying to make sense of — as technologists or as designers. We can make crappy mugs with random images, but there should be more to it,” Peet explained, trying to put it all into perspective.
Then he went on, saying, “If you think of the adoption of technology, most of the time you have this wonderful gap - you make something, you start to experiment with friends and family, but then there’s the gap for the big audiences to adapt early and later, and eventually just being integrated.”
And here comes the weird part: “Typically, the chasm is about preventing bad things from being published, basically protecting people. But now, AI isn’t a product, it’s not a platform, but it’s a part of a platform. So if Microsoft says, ‘We are doing AI,’ you cannot disable AI. You can’t unbuy non-AI PCs in the near future. So they are forcing AI, and the crappiness that comes with it, onto us,” Peet said, with a hint of surprise in his voice. It’s a brave new world, and we’re all along for the ride, skipping some crucial evolutionary steps.
And once we cross the chasm, there’s no turning back. But we still get to choose who this is for. Right now, it’s being forced on us by the platforms, just sitting there. So the real question is: who’s it really for? Who Gets To Do Tech? “I actually think it’s for us to take. It’s for us to take outside of the realm of the platforms,” Ron added, infusing a sense of hope into this discovery.
Right now, it’s the platforms that decide what technology and features go into their products. But really, shouldn’t we—the people who use these products to improve our lives—be the ones making those decisions? The platform that fosters this cooperative dynamic will ultimately come out on top.
And with that, I’ll leave you on the edge of your seat. In part two of this meet-up summary, we’ll dive into Why We Need To Rethink Digital and how You can jump in on the action to shape the future of tech. A huge thank you to our guest speakers, Ron and Peet, for bringing this thought-provoking topic to the session.
A big shoutout to Oliver, Rienk, Bogdan, Erick, Lyronne, Asuka, Asiel, and Renz — you were the key to bringing the vibe to the session. We hope to see you at our next meet-up in this summer series of Tech, What The Heck.
📅 Mark your calendar for Wednesday, July 17th, from 4 to 7 PM. Detailed information will be sent out this week, so stay tuned!
ADRIANA from Futuring Architectures 🔮🏛