It’s always embarrassing. It really is.

Six weeks ago, I shortly ranted about the immensely stupid fragility of our “high-tech” way of living. This morning, I got a confirmation that that post should really be the first of a regular series, by just looking at one home page.

I am not making this up

These are real titles from CNN’s home page, right now (January 27th, 2021, 6:20am GMT+1):

• “Stock market is at peak dumb: Etsy soars because Elon Musk tweets about it”
• “World’s two richest men are fighting over space real estate”
• “The megarich have already recovered from the pandemic. It may take the poor a decade to do so” (this comes just 14 hours later after “America’s billionaires have grown $1.1 trillion richer during the pandemic”)
• “How to figure out where all your money is going”

How long does it take to suspect that the answer to the fourth bullet is in the previous three?

Please note that I am not advocating socialism, communism or any other “ism” here. How to solve the problem is a whole other issue. But there cannot be any solution without first seeing the problem, and the problem is: the immensely stupid fragility of a system like this.

Is it right that there are people, not States, so rich to bicker over space during a pandemic that will take almost all the others a decade to recover? You decide.

I am only saying that something like this is too fragile to keep going. Too stupidly fragile. And no solution can come without acknowledging this fact, as soon as possible.

Now, if you are asking yourself “why publish this here? How on Earth is this connected to the purpose of THIS website?”

The answer is easy, and is the same given in the first post of the series, here repeated for your convenience:

All the immensely stupid fragility above (and MUCH more) is all enabled, or at least greatly intensified, by really, really stupid (ab)uses, or at least huge misunderstandings, of both digital technologies and what innovation is

Bill Watterson! is right: " the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."

If you agree that our hyper-(mis)digitized way of living is a galactic embarrassment, see the yellow box below to help me keep fighting it.