Buzz

1. noun: a sibilant hum, such as is made by bees, flies and other winged insects

2. noun: a busy rumor

(There are multiple other definitions of this word, but for now, I'll stick to these two from the OED).

I've spent a good deal of my life working in technology. "Buzz" and "hype" are a part of the tech world. Crypto, AI, deep learning, data science, big data, startup, social media marketing - a whole world of buzz words from the last fifteen years or so, hyped at events like SXSW and then promulgated by an unending spate of meetup groups in San Francisco.

It's really boring most of it. SXSW was always at its most boring when you were around these types of people that drank this terminal kool-aid.

This is also to say I haven't at a lot of times in my life been really excited about the potential of technology (ok, not social media marketing - that has never at all interested me). But in the world where meaning of almost everything, in politics, in business, even in commencements (I attended my child's 8th grade fly-up ceremony today and I swear the principal's speech could have been generated by an AI it was so pro-forma and laden with words like 'embark', 'dreams', etc., etc.), has become so devoid of content and context (or hell, even basic respect to be honest), I'm pretty sure everyone and anyone is at sea for making sense of a world that simply doesn't make much sense anymore to anyone.

Photos by Zeynep Sümer, Karl Callwood, Sandy Millar on Unsplash

Since I organized my day around my kid's graduation ceremony, I mostly read while waiting on things. I read a book on bees - on their evolution, their importance to human diets, on Colony Collapse Disorder. I thought after I had finished - this is something that actually has value. Food and life and things that not only humans, but many other lives on this planet could not exist without. After I finished up the last chapter, sitting in my garden, I looked at the blooms on my pea plants and the blossoming nasturtiums and roses. The peas I planted bring my a lot greater joy than pretty much any piece of code I've written. The flowers I tend mean life for bees and the other pollinators that wander through my yard. What in technology have I ever done that was so significant?

The answer is, not much. Tech always feels like it's an industry in search of a purpose other than making money, and for the most part, it's not. There are really useful and interesting applications for almost all types of computational technology, but mostly people use it for cat videos or something far more nefarious. The internet, for example, has fallen far short of its glorious promises in the 90s. I'm sure generative AI will not fail to do the same.

We can live without LLMs, or computers. At the end of the day, they don't really do much. But we can't live without bees or plants. So I'm pretty sure that is really the buzz I'm far more interested in following these days.