This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Hello and welcome to an very special emergency episode of Better Offline.

I'm Ed Zittron. I'm your host, and I'm recording this from inside a closet in a hotel in San Francisco.

You're very important to make.

Thank you. You're very important to me. On Friday afternoon I sat on my desk and just started writing without any clear aim or objective, other than the desire to wrap my head around. Probably the most

cataclysmic technological meltdown that I've seen in my career. And of course, I'm referring

to the crowd strike situation. How was it the piece of software? One that few people understood,

made by a company that people really didn't know, was able to shut down our banking system,

air travel, TV,

logistics chains, those weird screens that you see around, and of course, hospitals.

And as I wrote this script, I found myself returning to some of the themes that I wrote about

in the rock economy and the shareholder supremacy and many other pieces that speak to a larger

problem in the tech industry. a complete misalignment in the

incentives of most major tech companies, which has become less about building new technologies

and maintaining them and then selling them to people who would then use them over time,

and more about capturing monopolies and gearing organizations to extract value from the things

around them.

Every problem you see is a result of the tech industry, from the people funding the earliest startups, the trillion-dollar juggernauts that dominate our lives, and the fact that it's no

longer focused on the creation of technology with a purpose and organizations driven towards said purpose.

Everything's about expressing growth and about showing how you will dominate an industry rather

than serve it and providing metrics that speak to the paradoxical notion that you'll grow forever

...