There is no greater game changer then technology. While most see technology as a tool to accomplish a task or a trivial decision point, I view it quite differently. Technology can be a weapon or a gift, a blessing or a curse. Those that utilize information technology to accomplish tasks have their entire lives transformed by the way at which they command it. Poor user experience leads to poor quality of life that can be seen in hospitals, government, and other institutions where technology can either hinder or enhance processes involving large groups of people.
Don't believe me? Ok, Build a site to the complexity of Drupal but yourself, from stock HTML/PHP/Mysql/CSS. (you no longer can in a reasonable amount of time)
Ok, that's a bit extreme, how bout just this task: See the time it takes to take a Drupal site and build it by going to Drupal.org and downloading all the modules you need, putting them in the right place and then SFTP'ing them up to a server. Test it in one place, then manually get it somewhere else by SFTPing it there. You can, it's just needlessly painful; the monkey pushing buttons on a screen, copying and pasting files, and seeing what happens.
Now do that same task with Drush. Now do that same task with Drush recipes in recording mode, then play it back. Destroy the system and deploy it hundreds of times over in Travis CI or provision between systems when things "just work" via Ansible or any other number of formats. Automation is changing society and at an increasingly greater scale day after day.
When you can do the same amount of work in seconds instead of minutes is one thing, but when you can do the work of years in seconds, that's something new. An entire sector can emerge from the transformative pace of automation specialists (DevOps). If you can work infinitely faster, you can change and make decisions just as quickly.
This is the Singularity.
A time in which technology is able to change so rapidly that we as humans can't keep up with it. "Program or be the Programmed". We truly live in amazing times where everything is awesome and no one seems to realize it because they complain about having to manually do.. anything.
This is a non-technical talk but a philosophical. I will argue that as long as you use DevOps practices and Drupal and you make technology irrelevant (through automation) that all you have left is philosophy; how we go about applying said technology (because creation and deployment will be increasingly more automated). A conversation rather then a lecture, framed around a major institution that has been transformed through a principle of Technological Activism that I often refer to as Information Altruism (IA). IA is the notion that giving things away has the ability to alter the playing field of industries and institutions.
This isn't really a talk about Drupal @ PSU or ELMSLN, but it helps explain the motivations that bring me toward wanting to make both the best they can be. Life is about more then just work, it’s about making this a better planet. Philosophically applied automation and activist mentalities are how we can make the world a better place.
It’s not some hokey BS; it’s already happening.
Related video / postings
Drupal, Singularity, Digital Activism and Saving our Institutions -https://drupal.psu.edu/content/drupal-singularity-digital-activism-and-s...
Products are Ephemeral, Movements are Eternal -http://btopro.wordpress.com/2013/09/25/products-are-ephemeral-movements-...
http://btopro.net/post/transforming-industry-through-information-altruism
http://btopro.net/post/marketplace-griefing-oss-disrupt-industries
http://btopro.net/post/cultural-transformation-through-information-techn...
Note: This was previously given at DrupalCampOhio and went over really well :)
