How Technology asserts its power

Tech is supposed to be on the serving side. Tech is designed to help humans better perform, prevent tedious chores, improves life in general.

Tech has evolved into a protected kingdom. Its entry barrier is the complexity of its different layers. Tech is big, and is made of multiple layers of interconnected pieces of software. The specialists of every layer have often no expertise in the other domains. There are millions of jobs that involve technology building, maintenance.

During a period, technology companies were building tools that were tailored to users' requirements. The IT companies started to play a major role in companies, as the dependency towards digital tools became paramount. Workflows had to be adjusted to what the IT department was telling users. There were cases where the actual user requirements were not aligned with the requests set by the IT department. Most of the times, the IT department got the upper hand, and were able to impose their vision.

As the software companies got bigger, they acquire a monopoly status and came to dominate the users by imposing that users change the way they work to accommodate what their software products were able to do. They exerted pressure on the IT departments who became more or less intermediaries between the big software companies and the end users. These companies provide not just isolated pieces of software, but ecosystems that provide everything a client company ever wanted. The more entangled their products are, the more likely the software companies have to keep their clients locked into their offer. They listen to their users by providing upgrades and new versions that continue to grow their profit margin. Some software companies do not even bother releasing finished products, and they use their clients as testing sites. The fact that a software has bugs is considered normal, not an exception.

The attempts at creating software that ensure independence between data and software has been a concern for governments, until a certain point. When that concern was in place, the compliance with information standards was a pre-requisite for adoption. Not any more. The de facto standards of today are the most prominent tech companies, that are able to subject all their users to the policies they define themselves, without any input from outside and any accountability.