by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
I’d say more about Big Tech but since they’ve ‘privatized totalitarianism’, I fear being ‘digitally disappeared’ if I dare criticize Big Tech.
Mr. Bob Dylan was once again prescient: Everything Is Broken. You may think I’m referring to the political system or Big Tech or the Corporate Media, and certainly all those are very broken indeed, but I’m actually referring to everyday life systems that once worked fairly well. I could mention bridges that take decades to build that sport cost-overruns in the billions and the general decline in the quality of goods and services, but let’s just stick to critical digital systems for now.
One shared trait of these broken service systems is that they’re all digital and all online. Wasn’t everything supposed to become faster, better, easier and cheaper when it was digitized and put at our fingertips via websites and mobile phone apps? The opposite is often the case: the digital systems are broken and nobody on either end–staff or customer–can figure out why or how to fix what’s broken.