the tech industry killed my dad’s newspaper business, and now journalism.
Part of what drew me into the tech industry was the promise that threaded it. To anyone who viewed it from the outside, it was a place for dreamers, people who were enamored with big ideas, and most importantly: people who wanted to change the world.
I wanted that, and I took the bait. As I’ve grown up, from a 13 year old who took photos in front of every Tesla sign to a confused 22 year old CTO who is both an AI doomer and believer, I’ve had to very much confront the cost of tech in my daily life.
I grew up in Running Springs, California. That’s a town you probably have never stopped in, but have maybe driven through on your way to a ski resort in Big Bear.
My dad was the coolest person when I was a kid, mostly because he ran the LA Times distribution across the San Bernardino mountains. If you had a subscription, my dad was the one who made sure all of the newspaper delivery people got in their car safely to bring the news to you.
As a kid, he would work nocturnally, sleeping during the day to become the king of a warehouse most nights.
My favorite was sitting in his car, awake at 3am as a 7 year old, drinking hot chocolate from the gas station as he navigated the very real and complex world of delivery logistics. A world which the tech industry would shatter completely.
When I grew up, the internet was already there. We didn’t know what it would do to us yet. We, as a society, just had this incredibly interesting and complex piece of machinery in our homes, which redefined what was possible. In the 7th grade, I got an iPhone 4 and got on Instagram. The summer before the 9th grade, I released my first app and watched my dad end his contract.
I think about that a lot whenever I open a news website and see the digital equivalent of a life I knew well. I can trace the tech equivalent of the process my parents cultivated.
My dad was logistics, and my mom was (and is) and incredibly sharp forensic accountant.
My dad would have someone deliver a certain amount of newspapers to a specific store, along with personal routes to people who had subscriptions. That’s just a content delivery network thrown in with newsletters, publishing articles to a front-end, or adding to an RSS feed.
When it was time for the next newspaper to come out, I joined my mom in a little Subaru Baja. We would go to stores, count the papers left (that’s how we knew how many we sold), took the quarters out of the machine, and made sure everything accounted correctly.
That’s probably now a recurring payment processor and account management module, taking people’s money and emailing them angrily when their card doesn’t go through.
Now, I open a site to see a monthly subscription and a paywall. The paywall used to be the coinslot, to a box that my mom audited. A paywall and a site that took a logistical miracle I saw in most of my childhood, and put it in code.
That’s my job, too. Don’t get me wrong.
The company I’m CTO of may replace in-person defensible space inspectors. Defensible space inspectors are a very California thing, and are not widespread, although the risk of wildfire is spreading to states that have no programs in place. My code could replace these inspectors, at the upside of making sure more people are prepared for wildfire season. I don’t want people like my parents to lose their jobs. But, even more than that, I don’t want people to lose their homes because they don’t have the knowledge of what they need to do.
There’s no way to know the impact until it scales.
I struggled with that in Astra, too. As a digital non-profit, we are inherently cheaper to run compared to in-person programs. But, we’re meant to be a safety net for other non-profits to have reduced load for their in-person programs. If we take funding, are we going to take it from an in-person non-profit who really needs it? Are we hurting legacy non-profits by making their entire programs available online? I don’t know the answer. I’ve tried to navigate us away from replacing things and move to augmenting them.
But the reality is, we don’t know what will happen as a result of our technology until it reaches the world.
We won’t know if we’ve actually changed the world for better, until we change it.
Amidst the news that digital media is in a shortfall, I can’t help but ache. It’s an ache that the economy, and our world won’t acknowledge because the churn of capitalism and free-market won’t stop for anything. It’s a grieving over the death of something that another thing, takes the place of. Not because it’s better overall, but because it is in some way.
Most of my generation, Gen-Z, probably doesn’t buy papers or have subscriptions to the New York Times. We get our news from Twitter, TikTok, friends, and occasionally newsletters. Would I love to support media? Yeah. Can I afford to? No.
I’m indicted. Watching as I contribute to the death of something that gave my parents the money to feed me, and unable to do anything about it.
Genuinely, I fear the death of media companies at large, and in person. Especially local news. They are some of the last, and only defenses, to a world increasingly walled by echo chambers.
Media as we know it will never be the same, and we will all be worse for it. And there’s nothing that anyone is going to do about it.
Media has been disrupted, but there isn’t any progress. I don’t feel like the quality of media I get from YouTube or twitter is the same caliber. I fear every day that what I see is something a small amount of people do, and that my reality is being defined by the algorithm, and not the other way around.
More and more, I’ve come to realize that changing the world is not enough. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a shift. Progressing the world is what we need to aim for.
Consider AirBnb, which pretty much reinvented hotels at a higher cost to everyone while damaging our already painful housing market. Did it change the world? Yes. Did it progress it? I wouldn’t say that.
After I got off the train where the woman tried to kill herself (you can read that here), I called an Uber to make it to the airport. An Uber picked me up that was just a taxi van, with all of the taxi components, but none of them lit.
Often, what we end up with after the unicorns turn into bureaucratic companies is a higher priced, more user friendly and digital version of what we already had. I don’t know that it’s disruption as much as it is re-invention. Adding an app into a pre-existing legacy routine is just adding a middle man.
Although I’m stuck forever in between tech optimism and pessimism, it makes me examine my own work and the work I see around us more critically.
In my opinion, the truly world changing pieces of software will not be the VC subsidized re-inventions we see before us. They will be small, probably indie pieces of software that leverage the capabilities we didn’t have before.
I’m thinking of Be My Eyes, an amazing app that allows people who are blind to call volunteers to utilize the camera to assist them. That epitomizes progress vs. disruption to me. They took a new paradigm and used to it to provide things that didn’t previously exist, and we’re all better for it.
There is some technology that moves us forward. Other technology just moves. Only time will tell which is which.
