The Digital Mirror: Human Side of Tech (and Why it’s Not Actually Magic): 1

For the last few decades, the tech industry has been doing a spectacular job of making everyone else feel slightly dim. We've been told that technology is a cold, alien world built of silicon and incomprehensible math. We've been led to believe that the "Cloud" is a mysterious, ethereal realm and that if you don't speak the language of the high priests-the developers who live on caffeine and dark mode-you're basically a digital caveman. But here is the secret the "experts" don't want you to know: Technology is just a bunch of humans overcomplicating things. Computers do not think in ways that are foreign to us. In fact, they are remarkably unoriginal. They think exactly like us, only they're much faster and they never forget a grudge. Every complex system running the modern world-from that app that delivers lukewarm tacos to your door to the global "Cloud"-is actually just a digital recreation of a human instinct we've had since we were living in literal caves. - We built APIs because we've always used a waiter to tell the kitchen to stop putting olives on everything. - We built Firewalls because we've always known that if you don't put a bouncer at the door, someone is going to try to sneak into the party in a trench coat. - We built the Cloud because we realized it's much cheaper to rent a communal warehouse than to try and fit ten thousand physical photo albums under our own beds. The Jargon Gate The problem isn't the technology; it's the vocabulary. We have buried brilliant, simple ideas under the mountains of "jargon." Jargon is a gate. It's designed to keep people out. It makes the CEO feel like an imposter in his own boardroom; the students feel like he's staring at a brick wall, and the rest of us feel like we're one "Update Required" notification away from a mental breakdown. This book is my attempt to kick that gate off its hinges.