A book review Twist: A Novel : McCann, Colum reminded me of how techies shirk responsibility by accepting and reinforcing marketing bubbles. My good friend Hagen reminded me back in the 2000s to say ‘network’ when talking about the cloud. I blame Big Tech not only for the exploitation of emotions, but also for the creation of the fantasy of a cloud in which data falls to us from the sky, so to speak. Engineers still talk in terms of storage, compute and connectivity. This is also the case when building a chatbot and the image of a robot with a speech bubble says nothing at all. I orientate myself on ideas from traditional concepts (Eric Evans: DDD, Robert C. Martin: Clean Architecture) and modern approaches such as Martin Kleppmann: Designing Data-Intensive Applications and am not in a position to clarify the effort involved. Nobody seems to see the effort that goes into cloud software from big tech companies. I myself would rather accept ‘make losses’ as an explanation of the business model than point out the value of the processed data. We all make these losses.
A solution idea from the book review: If the ocean (the story in the book has the background of the transatlantic undersea data cables) - if the ocean were a bank, or if the climate were a bank, McCann says - we would have saved it long ago. This is a reference to the tragedy of the commons and too big to fail, but also to the lack of clarity about the material from which software-mediated society was and is built. Our data is the bank.