Hacker News Reader

Comment by resource_waste | Hacker News Reader

I have fears that the work I do today, will cause some sort of negative externality like Apple.

I might be a hardware engineer, make something cool, but you have some psychopath take your work, manipulate people's emotions and make them feel status insecure, then sell to them. Think of how much pain low income people feel watching Apple's commercials knowing they have an old iPhone. Think of the Apple legal team, promoting themselves at consumers and developers expense. Close to a billion people had their neurotransmitters negatively affected because of Steve's hardware success.

It just worries me that my good intentions today, can turn into immoral actions 10-20 years later.

View on HN

The amplification of Apple's prestige brand status and it's influence on conspicuous consumption is a function of Apple's marketing and branding efforts and not related to any IP they developed.

Sorry to break it to you but most people who can't afford the latest iPhone find alternatives that fit their budgets with very little emotional distress. It's only individuals that feel the desperation to gain the approval of peer groups that discriminate based on middle class luxury prestige brand markers that experience any kind of emotional distress from not being able to display those brands on their person.

>It's only individuals that feel the desperation to gain the approval of peer groups that discriminate based on middle class luxury prestige brand markers that experience any kind of emotional distress from not being able to display those brands on their person.

They don't matter? Why do their brains and neurotransmitters mean less than others?

Can a person be a victim to their own decisions?

I think you really want to blame marketing tactics for excess stress but somehow got hung up on the product being sold. The product could really be anything. Marketing is used to focus the social pressure around the product/brand. IP might give companies like Apple a competitive advantage to build their brand but it is not the thing causing your stress.

I think this is a general rule. Everything we do today, regardless of the short-term benefits they may achieve, will eventually “turn to the other side”, effectively balancing things out.

My take is that it is far more valuable to do things just for the joy of it.

If you make beautiful art, then psychopaths and murderers will still look at your art and enjoy it. Should this dissuade you from making beautiful art?

> I might be a hardware engineer, make something cool, but you have some psychopath take your work

You forgot the apple periods where they had little general appeal and it was just weird to use apple hardware. The process you describe started with the iPod, but its dynamic wasn't only due to marketing, at the time, the thing was really unique to interact with. You could really genuinely still think to do a great engineering work at the time, and the kid being killed over an iPod being a freak event.

I don't like this anti-corporate over simplifications, the psychopaths may be are, but they are not all controlling semi-gods, things emerges out of proportion also by themselves, like any kind of self-reinforcing processes.

I stopped primarily using Apple for a couple years, until they released OSX and I could run Apache, PERL and MySQL on my local machine instead of needed an internet connection to ssh to a linux host. Wifi not really being a thing in public spaces then, it allowed me to work from a coffee shop.

At the time, Apple seemed like they were about to go out of business.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com