Between Worlds

I have been working in tech for about 5 years now, but it would be amiss to say that tech hasn’t been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, be it through modding games or hacking my PSP when I was 12. So despite my years studying and working in finance, I still maintained a healthy relationship with it - I was running linux as my main OS all of this time!

But now that I work in tech and tech is also my hobby, I have been getting increasingly separated from the rest of the world, a fact exacerbated by the pandemic, to the point where I struggle to understand what people who do not work in tech do. I am aware that sounds incredibly close minded, and I don’t intend it in a disparaging way, it’s just a by-product of tech being part of my every waking moment for the past few years. While I’ve put my startup dreams to rest for the time being, I do have a feeling that this isolationism will be a burden in the future. But every time I have to venture out into the “real world” and deal with official documents, warranties or shipping things it feels like a massive struggle compared to the ease of doing anything on a computer or through a webapp. But the real divide comes from interacting with non-techies.

As a security consultant and occasional crypto bro, I have witnessed some amazing heists and breaches over the years. I feel like I live in a world where every day the next big thing is being discovered and you have to study and practice continuously just to keep up. It’s intense, exciting and exhausting. But then I meet with my cycling friends and their fields seem completely different. Nobody spends their weekends trying to learn a new accounting framework or migrating their carpentry shop to the cloud. Which always reminds me of the “Why Software Is Eating the World” article from 2011 about how tech will be in every aspect of our lives. It is the only field that is still going through explosive growth year after year and just getting more ingrained into our lives. If you think buying a non smart fridge is hard now, try buying a non smart house in 20-40 years. Every appliance will be connected and made to work seamless with the other smart devices in the house to make your life easier, while also harvesting titanic amounts of data that will only further to centralize power to just a few big corporations.

But this rant isn’t about that. It’s about how the tech world, the internet, exists parallel to the real one, but it’s slowly wrapping its tendrils around it. As I am nearing my 30s, I was still part of a generation that tried to keep their online persona and real one separate to a degree. And while that fact hasn’t completely vanished, the newer generations are growing up in a world where the internet is mature and more centralized that it used to be. Perhaps these generations are the real coup de grace of the tech world, people that could not imagine a world without a computer being ever present in your life. The final step in bridging these worlds.