The So-called 'IT' Industry Became Somewhat of a Fraud Where People Equate Usage and Power Wasted With "Value" or "Success"
MElon boasts about "the power of X in shaping national conversations and outcomes" while admitting they lose money (so it's basically like TikTok):
When did 'IT' become a weapon rather than technology/science?
Social control media is addictive by design. Is it profitable? Is Twitter profitable? No. After renaming as "X" and firing almost everyone it still admits that it's losing money. How about YouTube? The main question is, how much money is it losing at this time? It started as a failed dating site and it has been failing since (financially).
Now consider the lunacy of blockchain, 'cryptocurrency', and "hey hi". They sure waste a lot resources. What for? Generating fake images, fake articles, fake money and so on.
In the 90s we (collectively) were cynical and almost scornful when it came to new buzzwords like "IT" (there were others). Three decades went by. The industry isn't going in a positive direction, only a lot of debt and government (i.e. taxpayers, gullible shareholders/pensions too) subsidies. They sell their failures using buzzwords and when one buzzword loses its lustre (or investors' blind/ignorant belief), they will roll over to the next [1, 2].
To quote the witty Dr. Andy Farnell: "Maybe we should also prepare ourselves for the worst. If a technofascist order rises in the US we will face an unrecognisable cyber-security situation. Entities like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook may quickly change from being just behemoth corporations with awful, insecure products, to being actively hostile actors within our digital perimeter."
Judging by who today's richest person is, "success" (in the media's contemporary universe) means being able to grab the most money from taxpayers, without even producing anything of real value or yield real profit (the money is derived from gullible and patient shareholders). █
"Microsoft, the world’s most valuable company, declared a profit of $4.5 billion in 1998; when the cost of options awarded that year, plus the change in the value of outstanding options, is deducted, the firm made a loss of $18 billion, according to Smithers."