I’ve said too much

I just skimmed through two editions of New Scientist in about 5 minutes and barely paused thrice.

Précis …

People trying to copy nature. Scientists pretending to be historians. Technology focused on fleecing, dressed up as enabling. Physicists deluded by the significance of sub sub thingys. Medical insights designed to suck up all that affluence. The moral conspiracies of the industrial side of science and technology. Random things that animals and plants do. And trivial pursuit candidates from Mars.

I once had a journalist write an article for New Scientist about a technology that one of my startups had been forced to license (a long story that; it has a lot to do with the stupidity of some tech investors).

What was in fact a dream with a most primitive proof of concept, no feasible application at any price, and a cohort of loopy academic inventors, became the next platform technology of the twenty first century. Another ‘laser’, so to speak.

Looking around at the time, I noted that many scientists and technologists that were senior to me seemed not to notice the charade.

I was already losing faith in the system that I lived in. This data point represented a definite fork in the road. A moment where I lost my religion.