In Defense of a Difficult Industry

I’ve made a mistake, a lifelong one, correlating advancements in technology with progress. Progress is the opening of doors and the leveling of opportunity, the augmentation of the whole human species and the protection of other species besides. Progress is cheerfully facing the truth, whether flooding coastlines or falling teen pregnancy rates, and thinking of ways to preserve the processes that work and mitigate the risks. Progress is seeing calmly, accepting, and thinking of others.

That’s Paul Ford in Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry – and I think for the longest time I felt the same way; I mistook technology for progress. But the longer I live in San Francisco the more I recognize how truly wrong this way of thinking is.