Unfinished: Fear of Dumb
[From time to time, I’ll start writing a post, and never complete it. After enough time has passed, I’ll just post the fragment, because I don’t believe in leaving ideas in a drawer to die - if I haven’t built it or used it, maybe the fragment will inspire something else.]
I don’t mean a fear of actual stupidity. Fear of Dumb is something that’s visible all over the tech industry - it’s not a label or a trend, it’s the beginning of a sentence.
Fear of being dumb labour. Fear of selling ‘dumb pipe’ (in the case of ISPs). Fear of conducting a service, without providing value beyond execution.
Because Fear of Dumb is really just fear of irrelevance. If all you do is put input through a process that outputs a result, you’re essentially a placeholder for a future robot, program, or younger cheaper version of yourself.
No one wants to be irrelevant.
