Decade Of Decadency
2010 is approaching us fast. 2000 seems like yesterday. The other day I was thinking about all these technology achievements of the last 10 years. And really there is not much, we, as a civilization, should be really proud of. Especially compared to the 90's. Between 1990 and 2000 we have essentially invented the Internet. 32-bit Windows and Linux operating systems were born. GSM mobile telephony conquered the world. MP3 players arrived. Digital photography too. I could go on and on adding to the list of technology achievements from the decade before.So what about the current decade? Social networking you may say. I cannot argue the fact the number of users of Facebook closes to half a billion. 100 million of them play Farmville. But is there really value there? Quality? I mean value that moves us as human beings to the next level. In 1990s there was the Pulp Fiction. Today we seem to have pulp reality.
In the 80's we used to write letters. Not often, but very personal. Then came email. Setting spam aside, today most of the emails we exchange are forwarded messages of low quality funny stories, most of them in form of visual attachments. Facebook takes us even further. We talk to each other clicking "thumbs up" on links other people provide, usually via their Twitter channels. Can they be considered quality conversations? Everybody knows YouTube. One of the technological achievements of the current decade. Hey, look carefully and think about the quality of the movie clips there. Both technical and content. Usually below any standards....
Stock markets used to represent values of particular companies. Today there are mostly new inventions like derivatives and predatory high frequency trading, definitely the invention of the current decade. While some make money - lots of money - on that, it hardly can be considered contributive to the overall value of what we have and what we create and achieve.
So am I blind and deaf and lost in search of the decade's milestones or are we really facing the fall of the Empire?
While I generally agree that this decade was not impressive at all I would like to point out one technological achievement that I think is quite important: electric cars. We have been talking about them for ages but I think that only now they are becoming reality (see: tesla :) ). I know it's too little too late but still...
ReplyDeleteWell on the second thought I would give credit to Apple. It has been the most spectacular self-reinvention of a company I have ever witnessed. AAPL market cap increased almost 30-fold since December 2000. I never realized this potential buying the first generation iPod in 2001. The truth is they have captured two biggest trends of the decade: electronic media and mobile Internet.
ReplyDeleteThe next decade may very well be the decade of mobile electricity. What we see today (you mentioned Tesla) looks as innocent and unimportant as the iPOD 9 years ago... Who knows :)