We simply stopped the process of innovating new things that actually solve problems.

[circuitbored]

Remote work life during quarantine has been stressful for many. The problem is that we're still clearly not past the Covid threat, and a rush to bring everyone back together to spur economic activity downtown (based on tax revenue it will generate) will create a lot of technical debt, unexpected health care costs, and loss of life and capacity in many categories from top to bottom if it is timed wrong.

We need to have better work productivity tools in order to counter the psychological and physical tolls of not being in the office together. No one has leveraged text to speech well in work communication, but somehow YouTube and TikTok can transcribe any video via AI... No one has innovated a cost effective way to update office ventilation properly, and workspaces to prevent the spread of contaminants, no one has made highly comfortable yet very inexpensive N95 masks, no one has invented a fool-proof vaccination that completely prevents infection... I'm not saying any of that could or should happen first, but nothing has really changed about workspaces, yet leadership is still expecting new results without further lockdown to make them feel better about paying ridiculous fees for their massively uninhabited work campuses.... We simply stopped stopped the real process of innovating new things that solve problems, and there is a huge cost pushing forward with weak innovation geared towards easy profit under the name of innovation as may frequently do now.

The now 2 year long world-wide pandemic created a situation in which very very basic (and in many cases dated) tech was foisted upon us for over 2 years as "new innovation", but it's simply not. The MetaVerse is a rehash of the Sims (or any other networked RPG game you can pick with avatars) which has now been out for ages, Clubhouse was basically an Internet conference call, WhatsApp is basically a group text/social media rehash, Twitch is basically a video stream and live chat site, and IG stories and TikTok are just a faster way to scroll through mostly edited/reposted YouTube video content, Most web conference tools are all pretty much Facebook with Skype on top of it, And Web 3 often looks like the absolute scammiest most overly-abstract pyramid scheme ever foisted on our grandparents since Amway as well...

Most of the new innovation we've seen in the past years have created BRAND NEW problems (when they originally promised us they would FIX PROBLEMS for us) if you look closely enough at them. Cough... Social Media... Cough...

We are simply not innovating any more and there is a major ruse over that fact pulled by the entire industry. because it's still profitable to churn on. driven of course by the constant need to deliver investment hype... We're also putting everything foolishly behind paywalls so much that most of it is becoming pure clickbait, even on well known news sites. Even googling advice on how to administer CPR now may require a credit card when you need it most, and that's just despicable.

We're praising people for marginally recycling old ideas more than ever in the news and with awards. We're also all paying way too much for the underwhelming mediocrity of it all. Take a look at how every year most of the latest tech advancement going on with mobile and other software-driven devices is the ability for major corps to better track and harvest data on everyone. Data mining, subscription services, and embedded advertisements are nowhere near as profitable as being at the forefront of true innovation, but somehow most companies are stuck on rehashing the listed "old ideas" and calling them innovation. There is a reason why the 90s and 00s were epic for IT, things that had never been seen before flowed out of new companies like a river. Somehow, for some reason, that vibe got lost after markets crashed... If only the dodgy crypto scammers would have the same kind of reaction and pivot to more stable investments too, perhaps IT is a "pump and dump" culture now too, and that's just that...

If we could just fix all this and get back to productivity-based innovation over profit-bearing innovation and start listening to, funding, and hiring people that truly deliver real innovative results, the working world would be better in remote work mode, and it would connect us all better as if we were in an office with less risks and without another lockdown to no sort of accountability from decision makers in this short-sighted GroundHog Day cycle of investor-driven "back to the office" restarts.