You hear the phrase a lot, “things are moving faster than ever before”. It is something that when you live in the tech echo chamber or in today’s ubiquitous digital casino, you believe and throw around as if you live in some sort of exciting wind tunnel. “Hey Bro! Things are moving faster than they were ever before!”. You repeat it over and over, and your buddies all repeat it, so yeah, it must be true. However, it is something that if you shut off your social media, change up the people you are hanging out with, and get even one foot out of the echo chamber, you begin to see just how fabricated this message is, and how it is used to manipulate folks.
The speed at which things are moving are bundled with us “having more information available to us than ever before”, as well as the number of “friends” and “connections” we have, and the multitude of other metrics we are being programmed with as we work on Silicon Valley’s farms, wind tunnels, casinos, or whatever the appropriate analogy might be. What is most fascinating is that we all believe it. Try to convince someone who works in tech right now that things aren’t moving faster than ever before. Not going to do it. It is a truth. It is a fact. Just look around you, everyone else is saying it, so it must be true. However, when you ask people for any evidence that things are moving faster than ever before, you do not get a lot of tangible examples, just folks pointing out other stories about how fast things move.
That new technology came out last Monday, and now everyone is using it. That startup just launched at the beginning of the year and they are already at 1 million monthly active users. That new specification had its first commit last week and already has 50K stars. It is all so fast. Until you realize that you live within an information wind tunnel. You see stories, social media takes, and memes, and the people you know, who all happen to live in the same wind tunnel are saying the same thing. “THINGS ARE MOVING FASTER THAN EVER BEFORE”. All without any awareness that you are in a wind tunnel, or that you are just being told that things are moving faster than ever before. And you aren’t ever allowed the time or possess awareness to just step back so that you can feel differently.
Stepping back from the technology wind tunnel can be unnerving because you are so very used to the sound of the fan and the wind around you. You get so used to everyone yelling, that you think it is normal. However, after removing yourself, you begin to wonder how the fuck you ended up in the wind tunnel in the first place? And you begin to see how easy it is to manipulate folks who are in the wind tunnel. All you gotta do is craft short little meme like sayings and visuals and yell them to someone. Pretty soon they yell to someone, and on and on and on. It is like some weird version of telephone back in the day with cans, but now we’ve got high tech social media that operates in a vacuum wind tunnel. It shakes, the floor is moving, the wind is intense, and everything feels so real, but then eventually you realize that you live in the reality television studio for Silicon Valley.
