This is crazy. The electronics and telecommunications industries have just kept trucking on and improving hardware and connectivity by orders of magnitude. Meanwhile web technologies have provided the software complement to smartphones that let people manage their whole digital lives online, at the same time as hundreds of millions of people come online for the first time.
Are you defining 'tech' as purely social media companies? Or demanding entirely new classes of product? There has been an incredible amount of iterative improvement.
I think op is referring to what I call “capital T tech”, or alternatively, “big internet tech”.
There’s plenty of technological improvements within the past 20 years, we just tend to ignore them the further they fall outside of internet-adjacent technology. As incredible as it is that solar panels keep getting cheaper and more efficient, the real miracle is that no one gives a shit about them. What captures people’s interests is internet-adjacent stuff, and that’s especially true if said thing can be compared to as “a new internet”. Hence why when people say they want to “work in STEM” they implicitly are referring only to programming most of the time, and also implicitly referring to being a web dev or phone dev, and not some guy that writes software for power plants or whatever. That’s “capital T tech”.
I also refer to it as “zeitgeist tech” because I think we’re currently in a phase where said tech has captured the public imagination, but I think we’re also seeing it’s end, the decline of all major social networking players being the most visible side-effect (I don’t consider TikTok to be a social network). Or, you know, a “tech reckoning”.
Kind of hope we return to 2008 with Occupy Wall St and more environmental consciousness personally. Maybe it was because I was 18 at the time, but man, there was so much more optimism.
I build infrastructure (raised beds, drainage, chicken runs, composting areas) for our garden and even with that minor engineering get a good look at the level of manufacturing sophistication required to do basic things well, down to the accuracy of our mitre saw (which doesn't reset to 90 degrees very well) or staples that flatten instead of penetrating wood, or the timber I buy that isn't extremely straight. The lumber yard I go to often discards 40% of the timber in a pallet when going through it with me because it's warped or knotted or cracked and can't be used for my needs.
The manufacturing sophistication required to build a reusable space rocket is astonishing and frankly incomprehensible. It'd never be achieved in my country. We have 'barely good enough' materials for the simple stuff, and sophistication of manufacturing stands on the shoulders of layers and layers and layers of other advanced tools and processes and measurements and minute tolerances.
Even building a shed, based on the instructional videos I see on YouTube, in the US is so simple and requires so few corrections for i.e inaccuratly squared plywood. But people shrug off amazing improvements like watches that detect heart palpitations.
Are you defining 'tech' as purely social media companies? Or demanding entirely new classes of product? There has been an incredible amount of iterative improvement.