Humpty Dumpty is Alive and Kicking

You’d think the term “tech companies” would refer to any company in, well, the technology sector: so pretty much any engineering company. In other words, the list should include everything from Apple to Intel to L&T to BHEL, right?

Wrong! Take the company I work for: General Electric, or GE. As Ian Bogost says:
“GE makes almost everything — from light bulbs to medical imaging devices to wind turbines to locomotives to jet engines.”
And yet GE is not considered a tech company! You can see that when Bloomberg’s Shira Ovide and Rani Molla recently wrote:
““Non-tech titans like Exxon and GE have slipped a bit” in top valuations.”
In fact, when the markets closed last Monday:
“At the close of trading this Monday, the top five global companies by market capitalization were all U.S. tech companies: Apple, Alphabet (formerly Google), Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook. Bloomberg, which reported on the apparent milestone, insisted that this “tech sweep” is unprecedented, even during the dot-com boom.”

So what’s going on? Why is a company like GE not a tech company? The answer, as Alan Jacobs points out:
“The financial world uses “technology” to mean “computer technology.””
It gets even better though: a company can be considered a tech company even if its way of making money has nothing to do with either software or hardware! Take that Top 5 list mentioned above: isn’t Amazon really a retailer? Don’t Alphabet (Google) and Facebook make all their money through ads, which would make them media companies?!

In fact, that’s exactly what Google says when they are accused of being a monopoly! Google says it’s a media company (based on its model of making money, i.e., via ads) and asks, “Aren’t there a zillion media companies out there? Don’t many of them from CNN to BBC make money? So how exactly are we a monopoly?”

Words, words, words: they can mean whatever we like them to mean… Reminds me of what Humpty Dumpty told Alice (in rather a scornful tone):
“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarAugust 9, 2016 at 5:01 PM

    Humpty Dumpty had the great luxury and exclusive privilege of telling Alice (in rather a scornful or otherwise tone): “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

    What Amma has pointed out (in her email to you not in this blog response), "My spiritual guru Eckhart Tolle says that all words are only pointers, they only point to the 'truth'. They are not the truth themselves", is very true. Thus we can say Humpty Dumpty have "had a great fall".

    In ordinary communication, I find frustrated from time to time because if I say x the other person often takes it as y; and on my part too, when the other says x I take it as z. How I hate myself see doing it! But I still do it. This goes on and on...

    In my favorite subject physics, nothing anymore means what it says! Everything has to be said in obscure mathematics and whatever even the physics think is not what physical reality is. "Words fail us", the physicist has no problem in admitting, but he will use only a mathematical language for this confession too!

    As to Spirituality, at least the Buddha and Hinduism at high levels freely admit that whatever is said about the Absolute Truth or God or whatever He/She/It is, it is all vague suggestions of something that can never, never come under description. Their reasoning is not flimsy though - God, or whatever it is, is not in the domain of your mind, while the domain of your mind is a limited projection or that Absolute Reality. Simply put, "Who can know the Know-er? None!" In the Spiritual arena, whenever anyone says, "My religious book says so or my guru says so, hence it is true" it reduces to dogma. It is the same as Humty Dumty asserting “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” It is the grandest delusion of religion - half-truth (sometimes pure falsehood too) which gets the status of unquestionable truth! And, religion is also the most powerful way of enslaving someone who has naive faith. Religion is a dangerous minefield basically, but it has grand gold buried in it - abundantly too! Sometimes I wonder why religion goes on even! I suppose we will not let go of the buried gold. Some say it is the buried gold that will not let go of us. Who knows?!

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