The Coming Tech Backlash and What It Means for Travel
Skift Take
While the larger world is asking questions and turning on Silicon Valley, and the tools and culture it spawned, it is time for everyone — including us in travel — to pause to account for the society we are creating. The tech and social media backlash happening right now is a test for us in travel, as well.
Exactly a year ago, as we sat down to write our flagship travel Megatrend for 2017, Humanity Returns to Travel, little did we realize the coming year would play out in such a way as to make the underlying message resonate even more today: The whole world IS crying out now for a return to humanity.
As we sit here at the start of 2018 and within touching distance of 2020, we are at a reckoning point, socially, culturally and politically, where social platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, YouTube and others are facing a backlash from various constituents, including the users, media, regulators, politicians, governments and, in some cases, even founders and early executives who built these platforms.
The ill-effects of a constant-dopamine-hit society that has been created over the last decade is now apparent worldwide, and we are all reeling from the effects of it. One of these effects is what we termed earlier this year as Permanxiety, this never-ending anxious state of the world.
We are all beginning to see and feel the extreme effects of digital-led life: the casual tyranny of pervasive connectedness, constant virtual stimuli, and hyper-distractedness has taken over our lives.
Losing Control and Getting Overpowered
Whether is it the cancerous nature of our current politics or the daily interactions we have with our fellow human beings, in the virtual medium and even in-situ, we can’t shake the feeling that we have lost control, and that companies, governments and organizations in so many ways mine our digital lives to program, overwhelm and overpower us. For the last decade, social platforms have positioned themselves as different kinds of companies that exist to make our lives better, but we've realized that they're just like any other corporation, seeking more profits from their users. But in this case, the user is also the product.
As John Herrman wrote in a New York Times essay last month on what he called The Return of the Techno-Moral Panic: “We find ourselves aware of the power and unaccountability of the new marketplaces in which we socialize, communic
