So amongst other things I want to think and write about- there's tech. I want to write about it not just because it's interesting, but because of the utility. Because of what it will give me in return. This blog is the creation of identity capital, or a brand, that I can use. It's an identity because its existence is in relation to an external audience consuming its content, of which I hope derive value- capital.

This is the way of existence on the internet. If a tree falls in the woods, and it didn't have an attention economy to interact with, did it really fall? I said in my hello world post that I hope to make thinking about stuff a job. The most lucrative of this theorising, is no doubt, in tech.

The gravitation of the young to the technology industry is not just because we know what an HDMI cable is. The material conditions of subsequent generations are deteriorating. It's less likely to own a house, less likely to start a family. We are losing our grip on our social mobility.

'Tech' is the fastest path for building wealth in the new economy. I realised this in 2015 and learned to code. I jumped straight in. Before that, I was an aspiring filmmaker. I wanted to make art. I was quite an idealist about it too. However, I just could not see a path where I would be able to go beyond my parent's social class in the creation of art.

I was raised in a highly-aspirational household. In the 90s to 2010s, like a lot of families, we were fuelled by debt and welfare payments. We would constantly be moving house to be in the catchment area of desired schools. My parents constantly gave me and my siblings the best, even if they couldn't afford it.

My dad was a hustler. Among the list of jobs he has had in Australia, was catching chickens and screwing bottle caps on drinks. He took courses in whatever he could, trying to break into whatever career he could. If that didn't work, he would try something else. Because of this, there were always periods of unemployment. And in the post-GFC economy, he found himself in a long bout of it.

What was I doing? I was making art. I was woke. Life wasn't about money. In high school/uni, I was never before surrounded by such wealth, and these are the friends that socialised my values. I was part of a generation that pursued meaning instead of the material. It was the same with all my siblings. My sister quit her accounting job to try and become a physio. My brother at one point aspired to become a preacher.

Seeing my father unemployed was a normal thing for me growing up, but in the post-GFC economy, it was different. I was close to graduation, and I could now see as an adult, what not being able to pay the bills looked like. Instead of being insulated from this, I was asked to help. Instead of being ignored, my parents resented me for ignoring them.

It was here that my aspirations to become an artist faced reality. I wanted to pursue meaning. But only now did I see the immense sacrifice that my parents insulated me from. And it was this insulation that allowed me to have the audacity to hold such aspirations. To pursue art. To pursue meaning. My parents gave us everything, insulated us from everything, and got what they paid for. A bunch of kids, that had considered material conditions an afterthought.

My parents held a much humbler aspiration- to simply establish themselves in the middle-class. To own a home. I now realised that the world was not just about me. I had a family to take care of. I may have children to take care of. And so, I took a page out of my father's book- I hustled. But there was nothing in the present that could give me or my family the social mobility we needed, so I looked to the future.

With the rise of boot camps that offer 3-month coding courses, there are a lot of people trying to escape precarity. Trying to give themselves financial security or social mobility. I did such a course, and the people that were in it were millennials like me, aspiring for something stable, something with more prospects. The new economy was hollowing out the middle-class, and when faced with this reality, they were trying to claw their way back to regain some semblance of the wealth that their parents had.

So writing about technology, in this newsletter, is also an obligation. While I have since been working in technology for a few years now as a software developer. And I can probably establish myself in the middle-class, and own a home someday, my parents are yet to. I still have future non-material aspirations. Like becoming some form of theorist or thinker. To exist in the new economy as such. And all paths to existence lead to the same point. Technology. The one avenue of growth and opportunity left.

Such is the relationship I have with technology. I both kinda like it, but also, what other choice do I have? This funny relationship I have, and most likely, a lot of millennials who have transitioned into it, have as well; give me insight on how I would like to talk about it.

'Tech' is not an industry, but a temporal horizon. It's the future. I got into it because everything in the present was crumbling, and the only thing in the world that could help me escape it was beyond the horizons that were yet to exist.

This horizon, however, is also a dream world. A reality-distortion-field. It's a specific lens through which people interpret the crumbling world around them. An Ideology. It reduces the world into a set of problems to be solved. Programs to be debugged. Friction to remove. Inside the horizon of the future, you look back at the present and shake your head. If only people 'got it'. If only people just trusted the experts. Trusted Mark Zuckeberg or Peter Thiel. People divorced from reality.

Tech discourse is shrouded in it, even with those that are anti-capitalist with their 'fully-automated-luxry-communism', and maybe more recently web3 and decentralisation. This distortion field reduces reality to a simplified world. Like capitalism or neo-classical economics. Where A connects to B, B to C. Where a very elegant scaffolding of the world can be built.

I see most tech discourse out there as simply looking at this scaffolding. Ignoring what's in between. And so, this newsletter will be about the ignored liminal space where complexity and nuance lie. The space where the future and history collide. Where politics and capitalism are inseparable. Where 'progress' encounters the limits of the human condition. Technology will simply be the frame of reference.

I got into tech, to escape the reality of my own material conditions. However, the world around me still crumbles. The middle and working classes continue to decline. The next generation coming of age in the pandemic will have it even worse. I continue to hold aspirations of us escaping these dire times. And I still am optimistic about using technology to do that. But not without a critical lens. The utopian promises of technology seem to not be as conclusive as its proponents claim. In fact, quite the contrary.