Weird Virtual Thanksgiving: The Tech Workers Trying to Save It (and Tech CEOs Who Don’t Care)
(Note: this essay is adapted from a presentation made by the author at IEEE’s ISTAS2020 — it can be viewed here.)
If you’re reading this in the United States, it’s statistically quite likely that you were traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday around this time last year, and are now staying home.
First of all, thank you for your sacrifice and responsibility in not risking the further spread of covid-19 and contributing to the second wave.
I also want to ask you a question that might not seem like it has much to do with Thanksgiving, but I promise you, it does. That question is this:
When I say cyberspace, what comes to mind?
If you’ve done a Google News search for Cyberspace anytime recently, you’ll almost exclusively see stories about the threat of what’s called ‘cyberwarfare’. But that happened gradually. When I hear the term ‘cyberspace’, I can’t help but think of the 90’s internet.
And I’m not the only one. For example, if you google “cyberspace movies”, you’re likely to see Google remind you of 90’s classics like The Matrix, Existenz, Hackers and The Lawnmower Man. (That one is admittedly not as much of a classic, but we’ll let it slide.)
