Here, I’m talking FinTech specifically, but this applies to most other industries, too…
There’s a (very large, publicly-owned) transaction platform and online payment provider shutting down in Australia, next month. It started in 2006, and was useful because it allowed you to avoid card surcharges and bank fees. It was particularly useful for large, instant payments like for flights.
Why is it shutting down? Not because of a security breach, or any issues within the product itself, but because the Big 4 banks here want to kill off their competition, and have forcibly removed the ability for their customers to use the service. They then followed this up with relentless paid propaganda around “security” and how the system is “outdated, so use our in-house product instead”.
I encountered something similar from my bank, recently, while looking at overseas travel cards…
Yet millennials and zoomers lap up the propaganda, just like they do against cash, and think that anyone who still uses these products is a “tech illiterate boomer”. They actively called for the banning of the service I mention, because their banks told them “It bad. Trust us instead.”
Yet these same stupid fucks will happily sign all their private info and banking over to social media companies and shitty crypto exchanges, because “tech”, and shiny new thing, so must be good…
The Kool Aid sure is strong, with my generation and younger, smh… 😑
Can’t wait until we all get de-banked for not being woke enough, and then have no alternatives because we allowed them to develop monopolies on our finances, lol…
Meanwhile I'm over here as a millenial ass deep in technology as my goddamn profession and the only reason I jettisoned my original flip phone for a stripped down flip phone that can't access the internet is because they literally took away the 3G network.
New technology is shit on a number of levels. I was discussing this with my coworker today and he was telling me how people actually seek out farm equipment that's 40 years old because it runs better and lasts longer than anything you can buy brand new on the market right now. I'm sure that problem is more widespread than we're aware of and it doesn't sit well with me.
Older kitchen appliances as well. Pressure cookers, blenders and others were called dangerous while the designs changed to cheaper parts.
I'm a tech guy who specifically uses new tech for figuring out how to use it for stories. Quite often I deal with people who think that something existing means everything changes tomorrow. It's not as easy as they think and it's a good idea to have experience in the field already to work with it. I can get concept art from AI, but I have to know what I need and how to set it up before I get the art I want. I don't just sit down and the AI faeries print it out in perfect order that even a child could understand.