Just imagine when EVERYTHING is networked... Imagine the message scrolling on the networked 'fridge door when you get home from work...
"We're sorry, but your software was unable to be authenticated. Tempererature reset to 23C at 9:21AM..."
I fear for the future...
I'm sort-of in the same situation. If you have the discipline, start your own business, but go at it slow. In your free time, develop your ideas, get any training/education you can (preferably on your current employer's dime, if it can be somehow justified) and once you have what you need, start a sideline business. After it gets up and moving, put more time into it until it can or does make enough for you to live on. After that, 86 the job and take your job on full time. There are tons of resources out there for small businesses if you know where to look. The main issue is weather you have the level of discipline required to make the jomp. As you work in IT, I'm guessing longer hours aren't foreign to you, and if you can do that, learn how to budget and are reasonably competent in a reasonably marketable skillset, doing your own business is one of the methods by which many in the US have freed themselves from the rat race. If all goes well and you get sick of running/doing the business entirely, if you get good enough at it, you can always sell it off and go another route later on.
Really, I think its not so much a question of tech = evil, its more like tech + consumerist society = evil. Tech is a tool, and like any tool can be used to either make someone's life easier/better or make a nuclear bomb or biological weapon. A hammer is just a hammer- neutral in stance of morality or ethics. Like everything, its a question of how its used. Consumerist society, however, is a different animal altogether- its a culturally-impressed personification of greed, and greed is never good, despite what Gordon Gecko says. When you mix black and white, you always get grey and in the case of tech + consumerism, its the same thing.
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Just imagine when EVERYTHING is networked... Imagine the message scrolling on the networked 'fridge door when you get home from work... "We're sorry, but your software was unable to be authenticated. Tempererature reset to 23C at 9:21AM..." I fear for the future...
I'm sort-of in the same situation. If you have the discipline, start your own business, but go at it slow. In your free time, develop your ideas, get any training/education you can (preferably on your current employer's dime, if it can be somehow justified) and once you have what you need, start a sideline business. After it gets up and moving, put more time into it until it can or does make enough for you to live on. After that, 86 the job and take your job on full time. There are tons of resources out there for small businesses if you know where to look. The main issue is weather you have the level of discipline required to make the jomp. As you work in IT, I'm guessing longer hours aren't foreign to you, and if you can do that, learn how to budget and are reasonably competent in a reasonably marketable skillset, doing your own business is one of the methods by which many in the US have freed themselves from the rat race. If all goes well and you get sick of running/doing the business entirely, if you get good enough at it, you can always sell it off and go another route later on.
Really, I think its not so much a question of tech = evil, its more like tech + consumerist society = evil. Tech is a tool, and like any tool can be used to either make someone's life easier/better or make a nuclear bomb or biological weapon. A hammer is just a hammer- neutral in stance of morality or ethics. Like everything, its a question of how its used. Consumerist society, however, is a different animal altogether- its a culturally-impressed personification of greed, and greed is never good, despite what Gordon Gecko says. When you mix black and white, you always get grey and in the case of tech + consumerism, its the same thing.