Jeff Bezos is making a surprise visit in tech's Twilight Zone year
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Alexei Oreskovic
Jun 17, 2020, 22:18 IST
Samantha Lee/Business Insider
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This week: Welcome to the tech Twilight Zone
Has everything about tech gotten a couple notches stranger lately?
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A scan of recent headlines certainly gives that impression:
But the tech industry is now the corporate world's dominant industry, representing the most valuable companies and employing tens of millions of people. There's a lot at stake for these businesses, and we've grown accustomed to watching them act with the caution and bureaucracy of all big businesses, even as they preach disruption.
Maybe it's because the entire world is experiencing so much disruption in this moment that tech appears to be going through a shakeup of its own. The employee protests over diversity, facial recognition technology, and worker rights are upending the status quo.
These changes aren't being driven by the tech companies. The tech companies are the ones being disrupted, from within and without. Revered founders like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are being openly called out, their famous leadership principles challenged, by their own stock-optioned workers. That probably wasn't part of any company's five-year plan.
Amazon has come out of the coronavirus crisis stronger than ever, even if its reputation took a bit of hit. And given how extensive Amazon's empire is, from cloud computing to Whole Foods, there's likely to be a lot of ground to cover.
The Bezos show on Capitol Hill is happening sometime this summer. Who knows what other surprises 2020 has in store for us.
Just in time for Fathers' Day, the Elon Musk coloring book is here. The 52-page book features original illustrations based on some of the best tweets Musk has composed over the years.
Some of Musk's 11,000-plus tweets, of course, have landed the entrepreneur in hot water — his characterization of a British cave diver he was feuding with as "pedo guy," and his comments about securing funding to privatize Tesla come to mind — but the coloring book sticks to Musk's admirable side. Readers will find tweets about environmentalism, space exploration, and scientific progress alongside intriguing, surreal illustrations (the one above is Gomez' interpretation of the Musk tweet "Sure feels weird to find myself defending the robots").
Whether you're Musk fan, a colorer of books, or a collector of tech memorabilia, "Illuminated tweets," which is being offered on Kickstarter to anyone who pays $30, is sure to please.
"Suddenly you're talking to a robot – not a device, not a computer screen, or a cylinder that's sitting on your desk. You're talking to something that looks like a human being, and that's where the magic happens."
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