I feel this! I never had a computer until I was 40, and no smartphone until I was fifty (an early adopter)! Now I have three emails, with one to receive my Substack. Otherwise, I miss my friends due to all the incoming. It's crazy!
I was going to leave a comment, but wouldn't that add just a tiny speck of fragmentation? But if I didn't leave a comment wouldn't that show that I was not fully engaged with the piece? So I compromised and left a comment but skipped Subway.
This brought to mind a regular reaction I get often. I think it is related to AI, but also modern business theory. There is no customer service anymore, just pretend customer service. I think it started with outsourcing to call centers in India. Businesses bought into the idea that customers didn't need service, they just wanted to talk to someone. They might have been on to something. Many people can't deal with instructions, they prefer having someone else doing things for them.
So businesses, instead of hiring and training people to answer the phones, they hired Indian call centers to answer the phone. The call centers could hire people for a fraction of what an American company would spend. So what if the hirelings could hardly understand English, could only speak English in an undecipherable accent, did not know anything about the product being called about, and probably despised the lazy, rich Americans who called in. The businesses felt the same about their customers. Besides they designed and built product as cheaply and shoddily as they could and the customers had already bought and paid for their crap and were likely stupid enough to just throw them away and buy replacements. And we usually ended up doing just that, piling more plastic into our garbage dumps to slowly disintegrate and pollute the soil and water around us. It might take a few years (or decades) for Americans to stop calling and resign themselves to not having useful gadgets, and by then the companies would have off-shored manufacturing and just switched to another product for their businesses to sell, that were equally dysfunctional.
And, round and round they go, the monkey chasing the weasel--till they all fall down. Take that to Tao.
I feel this! I never had a computer until I was 40, and no smartphone until I was fifty (an early adopter)! Now I have three emails, with one to receive my Substack. Otherwise, I miss my friends due to all the incoming. It's crazy!
It’s wild for sure. I wrote this article to find peace with it all.
I was going to leave a comment, but wouldn't that add just a tiny speck of fragmentation? But if I didn't leave a comment wouldn't that show that I was not fully engaged with the piece? So I compromised and left a comment but skipped Subway.
This brought to mind a regular reaction I get often. I think it is related to AI, but also modern business theory. There is no customer service anymore, just pretend customer service. I think it started with outsourcing to call centers in India. Businesses bought into the idea that customers didn't need service, they just wanted to talk to someone. They might have been on to something. Many people can't deal with instructions, they prefer having someone else doing things for them.
So businesses, instead of hiring and training people to answer the phones, they hired Indian call centers to answer the phone. The call centers could hire people for a fraction of what an American company would spend. So what if the hirelings could hardly understand English, could only speak English in an undecipherable accent, did not know anything about the product being called about, and probably despised the lazy, rich Americans who called in. The businesses felt the same about their customers. Besides they designed and built product as cheaply and shoddily as they could and the customers had already bought and paid for their crap and were likely stupid enough to just throw them away and buy replacements. And we usually ended up doing just that, piling more plastic into our garbage dumps to slowly disintegrate and pollute the soil and water around us. It might take a few years (or decades) for Americans to stop calling and resign themselves to not having useful gadgets, and by then the companies would have off-shored manufacturing and just switched to another product for their businesses to sell, that were equally dysfunctional.
And, round and round they go, the monkey chasing the weasel--till they all fall down. Take that to Tao.