We Deify Tech Too Much At Work

Can we pivot this?

Many of us deify tech in our personal, day-to-day lives. How could we not? Our phones are always with us and there are dozens of things — functional and fun — we can do on there. Tech has also made our lives generally easier (more on that in a second), from finding entertainment to staying connected with friends to how we use our ovens. Many of us love us some tech.

There are inherent problems with this on the personal side, of course. Social media is a pre-eminent example. It’s made the general “rat race” a lot worse for most, and it’s an echo chamber at best. That means we’re getting less exposure to different ideas, which is going to continue to make people divisive on important issues. It’s also going to increase feelings of social isolation.

None of this is rocket science. But tech is cool, fast, and fun — so we deify it and let it creep into all corners of our lives. That train is not going backwards anytime soon. We just need to continue to deal there.

That was all the personal side of things.

What about work?

I’d argue work has mostly benefited from tech in terms of productivity metrics. Tasks that would have taken 40 hours/week in 1950 could be done in 11 or less in 2015. Just by benefit of Excel and Google being invented…