THE concept of “Jerk Tech” is very hot this month as the ever churning ferment of technology innovation throws up increasingly ill-advised ideas.

But now vast rivers of gold have flowed out of technological innovation, dreamers and schemers are flooding in with little thought beyond getting rich as quickly as possible. They’re rarely evil in their intent, rather they don’t think things through.

The two cases that have gained the most attention this month are “Monkey Parking” and “Reservation Hop”.

In theory, “Monkey Parking” gives people a cash incentive to let other people know when they’re freeing up a public parking space. In practice, people flood into areas of high parking demand and squat until they get paid to leave the spot, which was not theirs to sell.

“Reservation Hop” lets people sell their restaurant reservations, in theory if they can’t make it. But in practice it encourages people to make fake bookings, crowding out anyone who can’t pay and leaving restaurants with empty tables, not to mention a reduced discretionary spend from their remaining customers.

These are simply recent peer-to-peer services that reward awful behaviour.

Once we stop drinking the Kool-Aid that all technology is progress (and therefore good) and apply this new filter then it’s easy to see some other areas of technology that have been pretty jerky over the years.

Email spammers have been furiously innovating for 20 years. When Sanford Wallace created the industry in 1997 he made some moderately credible arguments that he was merely a legitimate businessman creating marketing opportunities.

Before Sanford one could draw a line to direct marketers with their snail-mail lists who were using the technology of their day in pretty jerkish ways.

Aspiring snake-oil salesmen all over the world pay hundreds of dollars to hear workers from Barack Obama’s election campaigns tell how they revolutionised the use of technology in elections.

The problem is that the lessons they teach aren’t how to best inform and engage citizens in a democratic discourse. What they teach is how best to extract cash money from the committed support base to throw at advertising to convince the uncertain.

Here in Canberra we have no end of dreamers hoping to disrupt the entrenched players and build a better world (selling out afterwards to soak their feet in buckets of Pol Roger on the French Riviera perhaps), I used to be one of them.

For the most part they go nowhere, some few are unlucky enough to build something promising, at which point they need to be very careful of the sharks that swim in these waters.

A danger of the fast-moving “Jerk Tech” term is that, like “hipster”, it has in just a few weeks come to be a catchall pejorative meaning “something I don’t like” or “something that threatens my interests”.

In a world where everyone can reach out and touch everyone else, we’re all going to need to get better at thinking about the consequences of our own actions.