Why I am jealous of my parents

Before I start, let me be clear. I am a huge fan of technology and have worked in the field for nearly 15 years. I am also quite content about being alive and hope to remain so for a while yet.

However, I recently turned 40 and, with such milestones comes the temptation to take a step back and check the tyre pressures, so to speak. And I realised, whilst doing this, that I can’t help feeling a little jealous of my parents and their generation. If you were, as my parents are, in your 70s or 80s now, you’d have

1. …narrowly missed out on most of the horrors of the second world war, but yet engendered and fuelled the indomitable spirit that defined the 50’s and rebuilt our country...
2. …been bang in your prime during the 60s, benefitting from all that decade had to offer (and it was quite something by all accounts!)...
3. …seen the rise of some of the biggest entertainment acts of all time...
4. …benefitted from property value growth of truly gigantic proportions (at least in the UK anyway)...
5. …experienced a time when Britain was the envy of the world and very definitely Great.

On the other hand you might (justifiably) feel overwhelmed by the onset of the Internet and technology in general. You might probably have kept up with the Microsofts and the Googles of this world until perhaps the dot com crash in 2001 but, since the technology revolution really took hold in the mid noughties, it will almost certainly have left you way behind. I often feel like a luddite at 40 and I work in the industry.

And do you know what? I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing.

I feel hugely privileged to have seen the rise of information technology and the internet. It is one of the most powerful developments in the history of mankind and my generation will be the last to remember life without it. However, with all the good has come such a lot of bad and, having seen both what is possible and what might be around the corner, I’d be more than content to have been a “baby boomer”.

Edward Snowden proved that the allure of interceptable information is too great for countries to ignore and we’re not talking about the remnants of communism either. The US has admitted listening in to the German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conversations and, in a recent interview with the BBC, Snowden described GCHQ as essentially a “subsidiary” of the American NSA. Whole countries aren't even safe; Estonia was deliberately cut off from the internet as long ago (in tech terms) as 2007.

And please don’t tell me that, because you have “nothing to hide”, mass surveillance is somehow justified. Or that, in order to root out all those terrorists, we have to just place blind trust in our law-makers and accept our every transaction will be logged. Those arguments are entirely flawed, as this fantastic TED talk explains.

Not a week goes past these days without a major data breach. They are so commonplace now they have become like car alarms, an irritation. But we can’t afford to get “breach fatigue” on this. We need to hold our national and international service providers accountable, not to mention those law-makers I just referred to.

It’s not as though we don’t have the counter-measures, the IT security industry is huge. A lot of organisations just choose not to deploy them. Or, worse still, do deploy them then forget or ignore the most important bit – the naiveté and thoughtlessness of their employees.

And this is where I believe we are most at risk. Privacy and personal information means very little, if anything, to kids coming through school now. They don’t give two hoots about trading their mother’s maiden name for access to the next level of whatever game they’re currently addicted to. And this isn’t just a lackadaisical attitude that could potentially be addressed. They don’t even know to care; it’s just not even “a thing”.

I watched a group of kids recently. They weren’t talking to, or even looking at, each other, they were actually communicating through their phones, despite being only a foot away from one another. Now I’m admittedly no angel in this respect either but I like to think I can still express myself verbally, as a human being, looking someone in the eye, taking body language and non-verbal communication into account. "Conversation" via keyboard is fake and not a true expression of yourself, just observe any idiotic Twitter troll.

We are taking on different, often highly unpleasant, alternative personalities. The incarnation of Jekyll and Hyde on a global scale. And I don’t feel comfortable with it. I’ve seen all I need to see. Where does it end?

I do have some remaining vestiges of faith in humanity. Let’s hope technology continues to enrich and improve our lives. Otherwise the new Bond film “Spectre” might turn out to be based on fact not fiction.

In many ways, though, I’d love to be in my 80s now, checking out before things go really crazy.

What do you think?