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Admittedly, getting wound up over the remarks of somebody like Dan Tapscott is probably a bit like getting wound up over the remarks of Tom Friedman, Richard Florida or Faith Popcorn. Nincompoops selling half-baked pseudo-insightful drivel; shouldn’t I just ignore them?

Perhaps, yes. I would do so more readily, however, were it not just journalistic-sweatshop hacks who have to fill space on news portal sites and in business magazines paying attention to their brand of fluff.

Unfortunately this sort of starry-eyed gosh-wow new-economy-technology-future-go dogma has seeped into conventional wisdom without anyone ever questioning it. In reading a CBC interview with Tapscott the other day, I was struck by his perfect, if obviously unintentional, summarization of this mindset and how utterly barking mad it is:

… the knowledge economy changes all that. Yesterday you graduated and you were set for life — just “keeping” up in your chosen field. Today when you graduate you’re set for, say, 15 minutes. If you took a technical course, half of what you learned in the first year may be obsolete by the fourth year.

…

Labour markets are now global and given networked business models, knowledge workers are being subjected to market forces in real-time. They must learn, adapt and perform like never before. (Emphasis mine.)

Does anyone even come close to noticing the unreal horror of this tripe as they parrot it over and over in op-ed after blog post after TED talk?

Just what the fucking mother-fuck is the logic of technological “advancements” that make people’s lives harder rather than easier? How is it that no one seems to even think for a second before blathering on as if it were the most natural thing in the world about how we must continually expend effort to adapt ourselves to technology rather than vice versa? With no one ever considering the question of what benefit there is to all of this, let alone whether the benefit begins to balance the cost.

It seems that most people are just so completely hypnotized by the dazzle of new, shiny things, and so brainwashed by the constant refrain from all directions of how “you must keep up with technology, or else,” that they are just incapable of doing anything more than meekly shuffling ahead, hoping to reach retirement before they slide off the back of this accelerating treadmill.

This is not just “the way things are,” though. Human beings made the treadmill, human beings paid for it, with the original idea that it was going to make our lives better. Instead it’s turning them into a nightmarish Red Queen scenario in which most of us must constantly run faster just to stay in place and, thus far, the fate of those who fall behind serves merely to terrorize everyone else into devoting themselves ever-more energetically to playing along with the rules of this mad game.

Why do we not only let this happen, but continue to flatter and defer to those who urge that we must work even harder to accelerate further the tempo of this horror? Without anyone raising a voice to ask why we should actively commit ourselves to a system of “creative destruction” which is already plainly destroying value faster than we can replace it?

Or at least, without anyone listening to those voices. I do have to give credit to the CBC for the supplementary links they provided alongside Tapscott’s froth, which led me to the “Next Gen Skeptic” blog of my possible new BFF. One of his posts included a rather intelligent quote from a woman named Sherry Turkle:

I don’t really care what technology wants. It’s up to people to develop technologies, see what affordances the technology has. Very often these affordances tap into our vulnerabilities. I would feel bereft if, because technology wants us to read short, simple stories, we bequeath to our children a world of short, simple stories.

New technologies and trends are not gods, brothers and sisters. They are machines, they are systems, that we made to serve us. When they achieve the opposite outcome we should pull the plug on them and make something else.