The bloom is off the rose. New technology, the force that was supposed to transform the world for the better (Remember the bridge to the 21st century?), has come up short. As is painfully obvious by now, the force is not with us.Proliferating digital gadgets — smart phones, smart watches, laptops, tablets, next-generation PCs — have become addictive ends in themselves, expensive status symbols for the young and the restless. More to the point, the information and communication overload thereby imparted (at the cost of shortened attention spans) consists increasingly of the drab, the superficial, and the brain-dead — celebrity news, promotional home movies, political propaganda, pornography, self-indulgent blogs, compulsive tweets, all delivered through websites and chat rooms of dubious repute and accompanied by an avalanche of commercial advertising.Throw in the fleeting headlines of the 24-hour news cycle, the interminable cellphone calls, the obsessive “selfies,” the habitual “gaming,” the videos of everything that moves, and what we have is cultural white noise and mind-numbing distraction to the nth degree. Marx was wrong; technology, not religion, is the opiate of the masses.If the end product of digitization is questionable, the means to the end, which was hailed as our economic salvation, has not lived up to expectations. Technology’s New Economy, born in Silicon Valley, was to have ushered in an unprecedented form of civilized and enlightened capitalism, whose captains of industry would be laid-back forty-somethings in khakis and sneakers with minds as open as their shirt collars. Informality and unstructured work environments would replace the top-down corporatism of the gray-flannel past; we would all live (and work) happily ever after in free-flowing, uncompetitive bliss.The reality is something else. Autocratically led tech companies have become notorious for seeking out cheap labor, looking overseas for “associates” willing to work for less and constantly lobbying for relaxed immigration rules allowing more foreign IT (information technology) workers to be admitted. Simultaneously, they downsize just as avidly as traditional employers to enhance their bottom lines.Read More.Source: Progressive Populist/Wayne O'Leary