Yesterday morning, I went through my LinkedIn feed to clean up old posts. I’ve adopted a new policy of purging all social media posts after one month. Not that it matters now because I’ve sworn off social media.
One thing that struck me as I was going over my old posts from the 2010s was just how much the tech industry has changed over the years. I posted about various Meetup groups, an AWS Pop-Up event in New York, and various training events and seminars that I attended. What struck me the most was the optimism in the air and all the new technologies being introduced.
Now it is nothing but jobs cuts and AI hype (and slop). Something has changed in the tech scene, and I cannot put my finger on it. But it definitely seems the optimism and fun of the 2010s is gone.
Some things have not changed over the years, though. I shared posts on data breaches and application vulnerabilities. After eleven years, we’re still dealing with those. One would think things improved, but no.
My prediction that HTTPS (secure hypertext transfer protocol) would take over came true. Not only that, but now all network traffic is encrypted, even internal traffic. Even data stored on disks in a data center are encrypted. Organizations have adopted a “zero-trust” security model. That is, nothing is to be trusted. Not users, not devices, not a thing.
And why not? The model follows what happened to American society, where nobody trusts anything: government, media, big business, academia. You name it. “Trust but verify” has given way to “don’t trust and verify, verify, verify”.
Maybe one day the good times will return, and AI will deliver us the future the tech bros promise. Or, as we progress through the second half of the 2020s, perhaps the whole thing will come crashing down when the AI bubble inevitably bursts. My motto is hope for the best but expect the worst.
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