Technology Expansion Versus Advancement

Technology and bureaucracy are really very similar. Neither solves the problems it ostensibly sets out to fix, but people pile more and more time and energy into those things every day as if they do. It's actually a really strange phenomenon that doesn't get any notice.

I've worked in "tech" for many years--since the mid 1990s. I've basically been doing the same thing the whole time, connecting software to hardware, and sometimes to physical systems. Over that whole span of years, even though millions of people spent countless hours on the problems in the field, none of them has really been "solved".

If anything, computers, software and hardware systems are more complicated and consume more time and resources than ever. Most of the complexity is useless, too. The general pattern of tech is to replace one problem with two smaller problems and so on. The theory is the two, four, eight, million problems are more manageable than the one problem, but they really aren't.

Actually the theory is that by subdividing a problem ad infinutum it eventually can be translated to formal language. "They" think it's possible to do that with whole societies, because they're insane and evil. The thing that ends up happening is the formal language becomes more of a problem, and more energy intensive/resource intensive than the original thing it set out to replace or simplify.

There's a corresponding growth in the layers of management and "tools" for doing the same projects that have been done 1000x already, too. The field is getting formalized into an elementary school level of human endeavor. The management of tech projects attempts to translate them into some version of a formal language too. 

In an old post, I wrote about how bicycles actually have significantly improved over their existence, both in terms of their function and their reliability. Their design is guided by their use and whatever language description of those functions exist, it's really derivative of the experience.