Lifestyle
Feb 8, 2025
Technology, Money, Design, and Media: Is This the Matrix They Keep Doomposting About?
Jeff Bezos in 1999 for Wired:
If you had been a reporter covering the electricity industry, you would have been asking people about what kinds of vacuum cleaners were going to be invented. But the big winners were things like refrigeration. The Internet is still at that stage—nobody knows what the big winners will be
In 2025 you'd think we figured out the big winners due to Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, WeChat, Telegram, and VR computer companies. But have we really?
Do we generally like our social algorithms and understand how they work?
Do we know how to maintain our digital hygiene and teach its literacy externally?
Can we reliably avoid distractions in our hours of screen time?
Can we articulate and reasonably affirm the value propositions of the internet to a meaningful majority of users?
Give me a desk to sit at, a battery life long enough, and I will move the circumstances
In a more recent interview Jeff Bezos added onto the mental model of electricity and the internet. This time with regard to artificial intelligence. And I'd argue that cryptography should join it.
Expressly, that all three (four) of these inventions are "thin horizontal layers" enabling more than civilization can imagine in their moments of market manifestation.
Something — the inability to envision the possibilities in tech breakthroughs — that seems more feature than bug in human nature.
With all four of our next categories widely regarded with less than favorable esteem. Even though their possibilities-afforded are miraculous.
Technology
Technology is not something bound by hardware, STEM degrees, and npm functions. It is not a category we should be writing off because of tech bros.
At its core, technology is a lever for human progress, amplifying what we can achieve with less effort, more precision, and greater scale.
The toothbrush is technology. Less effort, more precision, and greater scale for clean mouths.
As is:
Fire
Printing Press
Concrete
Ballpoint Pen
Screws
GPS
Zippers
Technology is a lever. As Archimedes famously affirmed, "give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world."
Money
Whether we're discussing United States dollars, Japanese yen, Bitcoin, or secondary forms of money like stocks and treasury bonds, money is another category our cultures largely misunderstand.
Money is a coordination tool for human effort. Allowing value to be stored, scaled, and transferred outside of individual bartering.
Similar to technology, it amplifies what is possible. Enabling people to trade across time, space, and expertise.
Unlike technology's horizontal layers mentioned earlier, money has a y axis at its inception. Instead of being wealth and progress itself, money's a lever for wealth creation, and medium for human progression.
To reject money because of the wealthy is to reject one's own ability to expand and progress.
Design
I'd argue design operates on the z-axis. As a force multiplier for clarity, function, and experience.
Often dismissed as nonessential or simply for aesthetics, try explaining where design stops in one's life. Can you find a moment in your waking days that is not engaged with these principles?
Design is similar to, if not out right, a technology. Turning a thoughtless and bland existence into a meaning-full and creative one. It takes raw potential into usable, resonant, and efficient, functions and experiences.
Just like technology amplifies effort, and money amplifies value, design amplifies meaning.
What meaning means in this piece:
Form and function.
Intents and execution.
Context and understanding.
While design sits in a more privileged area of human activity, its influence and results garnered are so great, that internalizing the concept as decoration forfeits immense opportunity, and earns unmitigated entropy.
Media
Leaving media. The plural of medium.
We hear "media and news network" and think of shadows holding puppet strings with menacing grins. Concepts like propaganda, mis, or dis, information, the advertising industry, Big Pharma, and wars.
Yet media is just infrastructure for attention. A sophisticated tool surely, but not an inherently evil reality.
From books, radio, podcasts, tv, film, memes, posts, commercials, etc — media is a mechanism for ideas. Allowing influence to travel, scale, and sustain itself well beyond its origin point. Or long past the originators lifespan.
Every movement, brand, ideology, and consumer product is inexorably connected to media distribution.
So keeping with our mental model:
Technology → effort
Money → value
Design → meaning
Media → perception (reality)
Entertainment is a tricky term in this regard. As many may materially discount it of substance, to later take account of its subversive influence on their culture, and their own, sense making. Which, if left unchecked, will seep into one's opinions, ideas, beliefs, and reality.
Immature Internauts
Also in 1999, Vint Cerf gave a speech titled The Internet is for Everyone.
In it he minted a term "internaut." A hybridization of space travel and internet exploration. Deeming these first few generations as the genesis of a new human.
With the rise of social media, artificial intelligence, $100,000+ Bitcoin, and generation sixteen of the iPhone, it's surprisingly easy to believe we are eons away from 1999.
You can find people lamenting about the best days behind us. How the world is out of new ideas. Or the future's bleak odds at nearly any meaningful concept.
However, when you consider the four domains mentioned earlier, it doesn't feel like our species has even remotely gotten a grasp on any of them. Not how to best leverage them. Nor how to best understand them.
Our algorithms are reactive.
Our money is hyper-inflationary.
Our design is redundant.
Our media is poisonous.
Ironically enough, this is a bullish piece of writing if one can believe that. We are immature as a species. With so much opportunity ahead.
Digital literacy
At universities like South Carolina and Johns Hopkins, there are new fields of study dedicated to digital literacy. How to harness the digital dimension.
The world has one generation of internet kids thus far. It's the volatility that makes it easy to trick ourselves into certain assumptions. With one of the most prevalent among this genesis generation; the matrix.
Now a belief, originally born from pieces of entertainment media, it is a prevailing discussion that our species is trapped in a system designed to control us. With things like technology, money, design, and media as the main axis of enslavement.
This piece does not claim that things are balance, or that we can't improve.
It's an observation that:
We don't have as much figured out about the internet as we believe.
We aren't as evolved as we believe across many vital pillars of civilization.
These pillars of technology, money, design, and media are tools not tyrants.
The digital dimension, where these tools are democratized more than ever before, is still uncharted with no best practices.
Speaking generally to the internauts, it feels like we've been given lever, fulcrum, connectivity, and resources to a tune no generation prior has received. Maybe that's a more constructive interpretation of The Matrix?
