Is Tech Unstoppable?
by Miki Saxon
If, like me, you wonder if there is anything to stop tech from its all-consuming forward march, there may be.
Tech needs two things to keep going
- workers and
- users
So what happens when those segments start rebelling?
There’s a tech backlash best seen in the newest crop of workers.
“Working at Google or Facebook seemed like the coolest thing ever my freshman year, because you’d get paid a ton of money but it was socially responsible,” said Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci, 21, a senior at the University of Michigan. “It was like a utopian workplace.”
Now, he said, “there’s more hesitation about the moral qualities of these jobs. It’s like how people look at Wall Street.”
“It felt like in my freshman year Google, Palantir and Facebook were these shiny places everyone wanted to be. It was like, ‘Wow, you work at Facebook. You must be really smart,’” said Ms. Dogru, 23. “Now if a classmate tells me they’re joining Palantir or Facebook, there’s an awkward gap where they feel like they have to justify themselves.”
Audrey Steinkamp, a 19-year-old sophomore at Yale, which sends about 10 percent of each graduating class into tech, said that taking a job in Silicon Valley is seen as “selling out,” no different from the economics majors going into consulting who are “lovingly and not-so-lovingly called ‘snakes.’”
“The work you do at a place like Facebook could be harmful at a much larger scale than an investment bank,” Ms. Dogru said. “It’s in the pockets of millions of people, and it’s a source of news for millions of people. It’s working at a scary scale.”
Oops, seems that the moral considerations of where to work are of much more importance for both college and grad students.
Agriculture is supposed to be a market “ripe for disruption,” including tractors that do everything except scratch your back.
You’d think farmers would be cheering.
Instead they are searching out tractors made in the 1970s and 80s that are more profitable to use.
Tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s are some of the hottest items in farm auctions across the Midwest these days — and it’s not because they’re antiques.
Cost-conscious farmers are looking for bargains, and tractors from that era are well-built and totally functional, and aren’t as complicated or expensive to repair as more recent models that run on sophisticated software.
And it’s the “sophisticated software” they don’t want.
But tractors from the 1970s and 1980s aren’t so dramatically different from tractors produced in the 2000s, other than the irksome software, and at a time when farmers are struggling financially, older tractors can make a lot of business sense.
Both are good news.
Constricting the worker pipeline at one end and a user rebellion at the other are two of the few things that can act as Daniel to tech’s Goliath.
Image credit: Roger W
