Critical or constructive?

Critical or constructive?

Having been involved in computerisation from the early days of its popularisation in the 20th century, I'm often involved in ambitious projects that aspire to develop Company 2.0 or Society 3.0 - that kind of visionary, disruptive and innovative stuff that has become so popular. My involvement is thankfully limited: brainstorms in the early, conceptual stages or evaluations at the end. I sit in conference rooms, like I did last week, and listen to big words with little understanding of the technologies involved and their possible consequences. People are drunk with the potential of their world - not specific technologies but the abstract, vague spirit of the age: AI, blockchains, BIM, social media, big data are magic wands that can transform their reality into something else, something new that will help primarily their career.

It's difficult to remain constructive under such circumstances, lacking in structure and clarity of approach. What I hear reminds me of people excitedly buying more and more stuff for their homes, gadgets and furnishings with questionable utility, without any intention of replacing old stuff, without any thought as to combine the new with the old, just overloading and cluttering their lives. Yes, one can be eclectic and promote heterogeneity into a virtue but coherence has its advantages, especially if it helps reduce cost and effort. Computerisation remains too expensive and demanding to take it as a mere collage of an ever-growing collection tools and micro-environments. It's not enough to claim that one's making a new version of the world; one has to specify this version in a coherent and comprehensive manner.

But even if I would be inclined to neglect the overall picture, it's hard not to be critical of such individual tools and micro-environments. People just buy any old thing from so-called developers and advisors (most of them are just resellers of products with added unnecessary services: servitisation is for the benefit of the seller, not of the buyer), impressed by modernity and peer acceptance. They buy things that might overlap with what they already have, things that might not do what they expect, things that might perform worse than alternatives digital or analogue. Even worse, they often seem unable to take a step back and look at the mess they're buying.

So, what am I supposed to do? The easy option is to just sit there and nod gravely, letting them do the interpretation of my silence. Yet I cannot resist attempts to make them think for themselves, to offer them some starting point for structuring and explaining their own thoughts. It seldom works; one cannot talk rationally to junkies, it appears. Let the world dissolve into tiny pieces, each governed by salespeople and PR. We're rich enough to support them all, it transpires.