Is Technology A Bigger Story Than Donald Trump? (backchannel.com)

Steven Levy writes at Backchannel that "Technology and science is a bigger story than Donald Trump," arguing that regardless of who's president, future generations "will primarily regard these times as the era during which tech changed everything." Remember, there have been economic crashes and horrible wars throughout history. But people carrying supercomputers in their pockets -- supercomputers that change their lives hundreds of times a day -- is new and earth shattering... we are doggedly optimistic about the future, and how technology, with all its black mirrors, will make life better.
He ultimately calls the rise of tech "the story of our time" (although in a semi-related development, American researchers are now worrying about federal funding cuts). And Motherboard warns that with Canada's new push to attract foreign tech workers, "there's a very real possibility that the U.S. could face a brain drain as some of its top science and tech talent moves to greener pastures."

Comments

Yeah, no.

[pushing-robot]

Technology is a great enabler, but what changes society is who uses it and for what purpose.

If you had to describe the 1940s in a sentence, it probably wouldn't be "A lot of important new technologies were invented."

Re:Yeah, no.

[pushing-robot]

(...though I certainly would not mind if the most newsworthy events of the next four years were gadget releases.)

Ask yourself

[ckatko]

Would people be running these stories if Hillary Clinton was elected?

Re:Ask yourself

[Opportunist]

Very likely we wouldn't. Clinton was the "normal" choice. Trump is the much more newsworthy one. As a European, I can only say thank you. Because we're facing the same problem the US is facing: Disenfranchised, disenchanted and utterly disappointed voters that have zero faith in its politicians, and who also think that the media are basically nothing more than a mouthpiece of "the establishment", who are basically doing the same that many Trump voters did: Vote for whoever, if necessary a dishwasher, as long as it's not a politician of "the system".

This should now show us whether it makes a difference to vote for a loudmouth populist. It doesn't get any more loudmouthed or populist, and he has pretty much all the necessary means to do whatever he wishes to do to "fight the rotten system", both domestic and foreign.

Re:Ask yourself

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I, too, like social experiments. When they're performed on other nations.

Re:Trump's Failure

[ShanghaiBill]

He is already reversing course on all the rhetoric used to rile up the populist vote.

Trump's supporters don't expect him to follow through on the literal statements he made during the campaign. Only his detractors took him literally. When he promised to build a wall, his supporters were not expecting a physical wall, just that they would finally see a politician take illegal immigration seriously.

Disclaimer: I didn't vote for Trump, but I know plenty of people that did, mostly relatives.

Trump won BECAUSE of technology.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Think about it:

  - Internet giving voters access to information outside the mainstream press filtering. Especially:
        - Wikileaks.
        - Snowden. (Driving dissatisfaction with the power structure on both sides of the asile.)
  - Social media organization/recruiting.
  - Jobs crash;
          - H1Bs replacing white-colars in tech.
          - Illegals replacing blue-collars.
          - Tech replacing more white- and blue-collars.
And I could go on.

can we stop?

[jarkus4]

Can we stop with all those irrelevant politics? Trump won, elections are over. When he starts doing something there may be topics for further discussion, but now its just a waste of time. While there may be some people that are still coping with the results, lets keep this stuff out of slashdo as its for tech stories not social studies.