📑 Tech Fear-Mongering Isn’t New—But It’s Time to Break the Cycle

In an excerpt from Build for Tomorrow, Jason Feifer provides insight into Amy Orben’s four-step Sisyphean cycle of technology panics. This is cycle that has been repeated again and again over time.

1. Something seems different
2. Politicians get involved
3. Scientists slam the gas
4. The low-information free-for-all

Feifer explains that the way to break out of this cycle is to start collecting evidence prior to being aware.

It’s time to keep a record. The next time you surprise yourself by loving something you thought you’d hate, write it down. Memorialize it in a notebook, or on a Word doc, or just an email to yourself. It doesn’t matter. Describe why you didn’t want to do this thing, and then what happened after you did it, and how you feel now. Then store that piece of writing somewhere that you can easily find — because one day, I guarantee, the boulder you just rolled up a hill will roll back down, and you’ll be at the bottom, feeling lazy and defeated, and you will not want to push it back up. That’s when you need the reminder that you’ve been there before — but that there are great things on the other side of these feelings. All you need to do is say yes.

The question I am left wondering what the difference is between being critical compared to the act of panicking? Is concern over something like Facebook panic or is it something different?

ᔥ “wiobyrne” in Sisyphean Cycles – Digitally Literate (10/01/2022 23:12:21)