Great Myths of Our Time

"Technology gives us time to have fun, get educated etc..."

Only a lucky few.

The big challenge is that the world up to 1995 - managed by (relatively costly) “50 something” managers on the basis of ground-in experience, was progressively handed by “the big boards” over to the 20-something technorati with no baggage of traditional experience where “20 years experience” means one year repeated 20 times, to the new happening, connected, low cost online world with their exciting new techno ways where there was no relevant 20 years of experience to pay for. Instead, the brave new age of globalisation through cheap overseas call centres and manuals printed in 30 languages. And global PSU! Kids also meant lower costs of employment – and frequently obsessively on the job 12+ hours a day ...since they seem mostly have no lives and pesky families to interrupt their zeal for the shiny and new.

Thus we have arrived at a situation where the workers are treated like factory animals, beautifully admitted and illustrated by the desire for Google and Apple to offer to freeze staff embryos… how long before Google and Apple try and clone their outstanding employees? Maybe there's already a mini Steve Jobs or five, lurking in the wings.

The rush into self-service-online-everything (including by government) means everyone is assumed to have computer literacy skills that probably only 20% possess (one per household), and the rest are struggling. So importing kids from the EU (and all over) is helping.

Government expectations are probably that the demographic problem of age and technophobia will literally “die out”. And it’s true to say that if government actually tried to address them, by the time it did, we’ll all be dead anyway.

So meantime, it’s brutal for all those caught in the vortex. The UK struggles on with this transformation of reality in the form of “pseudo employment”, compressed salaries, disappearing pensions.

Challenging times. So for too many “normal people” outside the techno-bubble (of which LinkedIn is probably emblamatic) – which is just as dissonant as far as the punters are concerned as the much discussed and decried political-media bubble, for far too many, he dividend of technology means wondering where the next meal is coming from.

Us techno-bubble dwellers should not kid ourselves; the real people who hate the politicians have the handmaidens of globalisation in their sights as well, and that means us. It’s hardly surprising the excluded masses are now voting in droves for “none of the above”.