[rastapasta42]

>In nearly all of my letters over the years, I’ve lamented the idea that consumer internet companies have taken over the idea of technological progress: “It’s entirely plausible that Facebook and Tencent might be net negative for technological developments. The apps they develop offer fun, productivity-dragging distractions; and the companies pull smart kids from R&D-intensive fields like materials science or semiconductor manufacturing, into ad optimization and game development.” I don’t think that Beijing’s primary goal is to reshuffle technological priorities. Instead, it is mostly a mix of a technocratic belief that reducing the power of platforms would help smaller companies as well as a desire to impose political control on big firms.

I have to agree with this mindset. Technology is neither good nor bad, but it could be used for bad/good things. We should strive to progress society forward and we need to be careful with profitable distractions.

[matthewdgreen]

Many of the technologies we now take for granted (books, newspapers, film) were once considered “profitable distractions” by somebody. But each one drove the development of some essential aspects of our modern world, without which we’d be much poorer.