Worthy Read is an ongoing segment where I share a bit of Internet writing I really dug, and I feel like is worth your precious time.
Anyway, the pope’s encyclical is an impressive document, and I strongly suggest you read it, or at least read more about it. But it isn’t perfect. I say this with all due respect to the leader of the world’s largest religious organization: He missed some stuff. To truly teach big tech to put humanity first, it is necessary to catalog all the ways that big tech is currently putting humanity last. And because we are living in a time of historically unprecedented exasperation—a time in which many of us go through the day filled with a sort of half-repressed and unacknowledged fury that threatens to burst out every time the app we’re trying to use sends us to a website to log in, but the website won’t allow us to paste the password from our password manager, and clicking “forgot password” sends us back to the app, which immediately crashes—any account of tech’s antihuman tendencies must necessarily include a detailed breakdown of how its products are truly just a colossal goddamn pain in the ass.
What a cathartic read. Truly an indictment of how many bugs and errors we just accept as part of the process and move forward with.
Legitimately, though the article is comedic, if I were at a tech company and making decisions, I’d use this as a “what can we fix” list. The parking one in particular feels like such an own goal…