Here’s a mental model I carry around with me and pull out whenever I think about different approaches to thinking about tech:
Different generations think differently about tech and tech-related issues because, by and large, they move up the stack.
Using the broadest of broad strokes, let’s go with something along these lines, these last few decades in tech had a different primary focus, a primary area where most of the action was happening. Please note, this is not a scientific approach, I’m making these up as they make sense to me:
1980s: Hardware
1990s: Software
2000s: Web
2010s: Platforms & Social media
2020s: Platforms & Mobile apps
Each of these eras and focus areas bring with them affordances and challenges, and they shape the people who get socialized on these technological areas.
For example: If you come up in the early 2000s, the Web had gone through its first boom and bust cycle. Even though the money had freshly and thoroughly drained out of the field, there now was a field, and it was growing quickly. At the time, for those in the know it was absolutely obvious that we were witnessing a seismic shift, that the Web was here to stay and would remake the world in its image. And it did, for better and for worse. This was the time of copyright wars, of standards, of interoperability. The Open Movement was born to solve for a better approach to copyright; standards and interoperability helped users move between services and sites more or less without friction. But it was still individual sites, and the users moved between them.
For example: In the 2010s, social media were the big shaping force that remade the web, and parts of our society. Up a layer on the tech stack, platforms were emerging and turning to incumbents, but it was the early days of monopolies online. For some time, the dominant school of thought was interconnectivity, or more concretely: APIs. Users increasingly could stay put while the data flowed to and from them via APIs that connected various services. It felt like a plug & play world, because it kinda-sorta was. People got to vote with their feet: If a service sucked, you could port your data and social graph to another service. New, better services emerged and could establish a foothold quickly, leveraging existing social networks and their APIs. This was a wildly creative period. Then one by one, the big players like Meta (then Facebook) started shutting down their APIs to create competitive moats, and began the rapid transition towards monopolies. If you were socialized then, you probably look at tech either through a lens that focuses on the benefits of (or risks to) interoperability, or through anti-trust. After all, the move towards monopolistic power killed off big parts of that creative power that defined the Web then.
For example, yet another layer up in the tech stack, the 2020s where when platforms truly became the dominant organizational model of the digital age, and mobile apps became the primary interface for users. This meant large monopolists or quasi-monopolists that made their offerings available primarily through apps: A smooth user experience, tightly controlled. Gone were the days of interoperability or users’ ability to port their social graphs or data to a new service. This is the decade of lock-in, and of extracting the maximum out of users. All this supported heavily through increasingly algorithmic content control and dissemination. If you are socialized in this environment, you might look at tech from a perspective of free speech vs hate speech; algorithmic bias; surveillance capitalism; anti-trust; or quite possibly mental health.
Long story short, I think the big issues of each era are defined massively by the tech at hand, by the structure of the market and its actors, and by the reactions of the political system towards all of these factors.
But/and these issues also exist on a continuum, they are closely related.
Nowhere is this more obvious as in the Musk/Twitter/X/US elections context, where we see wealth concentration and market concentration and power ambitions and political corruption in the form of campaign finance all coalesce into a disgusting parody of democracy when really we see a kind of system collapse singularity. But I digress.
Because these issues are interrelated, it’s important to find shared language between, for example, the (now-ancient) Open Movement and those fighting against monopolistic power and those fighting hate speech and those fighting to make democracy more resilient against abuse from without and within. Only then can we move the needle. Without shared language and without joining forces, it’s like fighting the Hydra – you may be able to chop off one head but another emerges right away. Without working together, it’s like a big game of whack-a-mole. Let’s not play whack-a-mole, let’s whack that mole for real.
