Warning: Another Covid-19 related post (kind of)
I got into an argument this morning on Twitter (I know, hard to believe, right?) after I suggested that perhaps we are seeing the tech industry’s day of reckoning.
You see for well over a decade I have been getting hundreds of PR pitches a week from tech companies that seemed to genuinely believe that their (insert company pitch but often along the lines of “laundry delivery service for busy (or lazy) millennials,”) offering was truly making a difference to the world.
We’ve gotten comfortable thinking that our own comfort is the most important thing.
We’ve conflated “want” with “need” and in doing so have perpetuated a broken economic model.
The smartest person I know sent me a note this morning, saying:
… for the last 40 years the economic model has been global free trade. Border tariffs have disappeared and with them countless industries have gone. In the process, the nation-state has sacrificed its individual resilience tin favour of cheaper consumer goods imported from invisible factories. Perhaps the chaos that is about to envelop the planet will result in a rethink of our willingness to bow down to the God of free trade.
The positive thing from a horrid time might just be a general rethink about our priorities…
