Mike Monteiro’s Good News
When your job and healthcare depends on building the Torment Nexus, but you actually learned the lesson from the popular book Don't Build the Torment Nexus, how do you keep your soul intact and try to put less torment into the world?
I mean, the answer to the question is right there in the question, which of course you already knew, even as you typed it out. If you don’t want to add more torment to the world you simply don’t build the Torment Nexus. That’s basic math. If you have too many eggs, going to the store for more eggs only results in having even more eggs than you started with.
What you’re actually looking for, I believe, is someone to absolve you of building the Torment Nexus because you took a job at the Torment Nexus Factory. Which is a thing I cannot do. Not that I don’t understand your need for income and health insurance—I very much do—but absolution is the realm of priests and other con artists. But hey, you’re the one who brought souls into the conversation. So let’s talk about souls.
Specifically, let’s talk about the soul of tech. And yes, I know industries don’t have souls, but honestly, neither do people. What they do have—or lack—is an ethical core. A way they want to interact with the world and the people that they come in contact with. For example, not too long ago, tech was seen as an industry of progress and innovation. Tech was a sector that made us think of humankind moving forward, possibly into some happy Star Trek like future where no one needed money and pie magically appeared in your wall if you said “Magic wall, pie me!” One might argue that not too long ago the soul of tech bent towards the positive. And, yes, people in the global South building your iPhones and mining the rare earth elements necessary to make a bunch of your tech shit work might very well argue with that assessment. They’d be right to do so. But the vibe, at least once you put the blinders on, was a positive one.
