Cigarettes
The blog post discusses the history, cultural impact, and health consequences of cigarettes, tracing their rise in popularity through advertising and Hollywood films to their eventual decline as scientific evidence linked them to cancer and other diseases. It reflects on how societal attitudes shifted from glamorizing smoking to widespread regulation and stigmatization.
Background
- The author, "funnelfiasco," is a well-known voice in the tech/devops community (Ben Cotton), and this article is a retrospective reflection written from a future date (2026), using cigarettes as a metaphor for harmful but entrenched technologies in the software industry.
- The piece draws a parallel between society's long, slow reckoning with the dangers of smoking and the tech industry's current relationship with certain tools, practices, or platforms that are known to be harmful (e.g., proprietary vendor lock-in, surveillance capitalism, or toxic workplace cultures) but are still widely used due to addiction, convenience, or sunk cost.
- This style of "future retrospective" is common in tech blogging as a device to critique present-day trends by pretending to look back on them from a time when their harms are obvious.