The Future has Arrived

... but it may not be what everyone told you it would be.

It's already here, and it looks more like the "Matrix" than the "Star Trek".

I think that we are all slowly beginning to realize that the new technologies are not really what they're cracked up to be. We don't really live any better than we did before the Twitter or Google.

Perhaps the new techologies do make some things easier (communication, for example), but, on the other hand, they ultimately tend to change your life for the worse.

Let's not kid ourselves here: the driving force behind the advance of technology is not the desire to make life easier or better for everyone.

It's greed.

It's greed and exploitation that "make things happen". And, in the end, we always somehow feel betrayed in our expectations - the technology hasn't really changed anything that matters, has it?

It's because we had wrong expectations, I'd say. We somehow forget that we should only expect the worst from anything new, and it's because we're so gullible: we allow ourselves to get dazzled by the marketing hype, expecting the new gadget or technology to bring us closer to Nirvana somehow, or the brotherhood of men, whatever...

Well, the inspiration for such grim thoughts is that recently I learned about a new movie, called "Sleep Dealer", by the director Alex Rivera.

It's characterized as a kind of "Sci-Fi/techno thriller" or something. I came across it on "Wired", and on that link you can learn something about the movie, if you haven't heard about it already. It's not your usual run-of-the-mill dystopian downer, but a very thought-provoking movie, from what I've seen and read (haven't seen it yet, but I will as soon as it gets to cinemas here....).

Another movie I saw recently is a French documentary, done by Canal+, called "Les forçats du Cybermonde" ("Slave Labour of the Cyberworld" or the "Serfs of the Cyberspace", whichever you prefer - I'm not really competent for translating from French). Look it up.

That documentary is actually devastating, and it raised a lot of hubub on the local newsgroups when it was aired on local TV less than a month ago. The point is that the grim "near future" depicted in Rivera's "Sleep Dealer" is already here. There are millions of serfs toiling on the Internet, making the big corporations even richer than they are already. The big guns are getting the service/work done, without any obligations, any contracts, any strings attached. It's a Friedmanesque capitalist paradise...

Another (unexpected) link that turned out in my readings is this one. Forbes magazine, of all places...

So, what's the point of this rant, you might ask?

Well, the problem is that I'm beginning to feel like a serf myself, and can easily identify with those Chinese (or Mexican, in Rivera's movie) slave labourers. Relatively recently I was offered a "big" translation job by a translation agency, with the end client being none other than G****. Needles to say, the wages offered were serf-like (about 40% of the usual going rates for such kind of work). The argument: "Well, this is G****, and those are the rates they offer. It's a big client, and we have to adapt." Well, I told them I didn't care if it was George Bush himself (that was before Obama won the elections, I think...). I expect a fair payment for the kind of (professional) work I do.

I also told them that it's no wonder their ( G****'s) web site in my language sucks - it reads like it was written by a first-grader. No - strike that. It reads like it was written by the village idiot. No wonder, given how much G**** is willing to pay for translation... Or perhaps it was the unfortunate product of "crowdsourcing". After all, "crowdsourcing" is G****'s idea, if I'm not mistaken... :)

So, there you go. We're not that far from those Chinese sweatshops, after all, are we?