We should not listen to people who promise to make Mars safe for human habitation, until we have seen them make Oakland safe for human habitation. We should be skeptical of promises to revolutionize transportation from people who can’t fix BART, or have never taken BART. And if Google offers to make us immortal, we should check first to make sure we’ll have someplace to live.

— Maciej CegÅ‚owski – “The Moral Economy of Tech”

Maciej CegÅ‚owski is one of the smartest people in the tech space right now, and we are better for having him to take so much of the bullshit in the industry to task. There’s so much gold in this talk that I struggled to find just one good piece to use for the pull quote here. If you really want a TL;DR version of this, though, I’ll pull this one quote as well

What we’ve done as technologists is leave a loaded gun lying around, in the hopes that no one will ever pick it up and use it.

Frightening.

Please read this, and think about the world we’re creating with our technology—a world of surveillance, massive data that is both unsecured and impossible to secure, and increasing econmic inequality that can’t just be solved by “learning to code”.