The tech utopia fantasy is over
blog.avas.space
blog.avas.space
This sounds like it's better to work within the system rather than try to overthrow it. You need more than a little angst to completely reset cultural norms. Maybe you're optimizing for a local maxima instead of realizing the true potential of saying "fuck everything" and replacing it.
I'm mostly playing devil's advocate, not saying the correct response to all adversity is to plot a revolution. But my point is sincere - sometimes it is the best thing to burn it to the ground and start over. Private healthcare seems like a pretty good example of a system that should be abolished rather than massaged (assuming your goal is better healthcare at a more affordable price) and we have decades of data from our own country and others to corroborate that.
You can be positive and optimistic about big scale societal changes that throw out all the established notions. Likewise, you can also be cynical and jaded about small scale changes that just aim to incrementally improve things.
Aiming for big changes doesn't necessarily imply you have to be cynical. In fact I think you're more likely to be able to achieve big changes if you're optimistic about them.
Same story with "tear it all down" vs. "work within the system".
The same goes for the article's author. Sounds like they're shocked—SHOCKED—that private companies are just out to make money, and don't actually have our best interests at heart. The real issue is that they bought into the fantasy in the first place. But now that the veil is lifted, how will it change your actual behavior in the real world? If it will have no effect, why let it get you worked up at all? If it will have an effect, go out and do it.
As the author said:
> Stop giving them your money, time and data as much as possible for you. They won't bring us closer to these ideals they promise.
It's not changing the world, but I just do what I can to not contribute to it. And if any alternatives do pop up I do try to support them, sometimes financially.
The internet's outskirts are emptier than ever with this centralization, but I have made the active choice to de-activate pretty much all the mainstream stuff and use extensions to minimize their ability to track me. So knowing this did change my behavior on how I interact with the internet.
Easy to say this, but these two aspects contradict each other. You become jaded and cynical precisely because your potential to better humanity is locked down in beauracracy that has the opposite interest. One can only fight back so much against the tidal wave that was setup decades before you were born.
I'd even go so far to say that the ones who do rise to the challenge need to be jaded, and channel that into overcoming the wave. Being cynical means understanding a need to deeply understand every little action, no matter how simple and otherwise "objectively good" it is in the short run.
It's how you use that cynicism that matters, not the state of being cynical.
That sounds like a story of its own. Would you care to share the story about the corruption she saw? We so often hear the stories about companies hiking prices for lifesaving medicine fo no apparent reason other than profit, but it would be interesting to hear what she saw from the inside?
The most substantial corruption in the health/life sciences/medicine world is simple profit motive at hospitals, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), and insurers, and especially when those three entities combine into mega "pay-vidors" like UHG.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8315858/#:~:text=Pe....
The pharma and medical device companies sponsor the conferences that all our doctors attend every year.
I continue to be fascinated by how easy people priorities profit over doing the right thing. Sometimes they don't even stand to personally gain all that much, they do it for the benefit of some soulless company.
If you aren't actively making things worse for the general public I'll even let the sole focus on profit slide, but how can you justify to yourself going out and actively causing suffering.
Things like pensions are frequently refusing to invest in weapons manufacturers, because of the harm their products do, but why? At least they are honest about what they do and they can justify it.
Not to mention, their justifications are much more legitimate than anything advertising industry could come up with, and yet, marketing is a respectable occupation these days for some reason, and ad industry funds everything.
Tech used to be a tool. I remember participating in product design conversations in the '00s, and the focus was all on "How can we make people's lives better? How do we create software that makes things more convenient for them, more enjoyable, frees up time and opens up new opportunities for them."
Tech is now a means to turn people into tools. I still sit in product design conversations. Now they are focused on how to manipulate people into clicking on more ads and opening up their wallet more. The applied psychology is very advanced, and is more of a focus than the technology now.
IMHO, the root cause of this is the advertising + subscription business model, along with the provision of free products to get people hooked and then upsell them on expensive and (in the big picture, but customers can't see the big picture) insconsequential upgrades. The secret to success in the tech industry is "Demonstrate value. Nurture dependence. Threaten to take away features, unless large amounts of money are paid." In people terms, we call this an abusive relationship, or blackmail. In the tech industry, it's a very profitable business model.
The worst part is this is spreading to other industries like food production and transportation.
A sort of “second order” expression I see of these problems is the sheer quantity of SaaS tools that exist to “fix” a problem, not solve it. These companies have zero interest in actually making anything better. Instead, they exist to sell a “less sharp edges” version of the problem and leech all the money they can. An actual improvement is completely antithetical to their existence, and I suspect most of them would act to destroy a true solution if the opportunity arose.
This is due to the WWW which took off only due to its open model (shipping markup source instead of binary blobs) which was inspired by the then-nascent F/OSS movement.
That F/OSS "gift culture" really keeps on giving, eh?
(Of course the actual reason for open-sourcing of core products is to soil the entire market segment, preventing would-be competitors from selling a competing product.)
Linux never stopped MS and Apple from selling their OS. iOS and Android are paid for with the device purchase.
What killed the ability to sell software is ads as well as the VC funded startup model where the first step is to acquire users and drive out competition at all costs. This essentially means giving things away for free only to extract value later. Thi doesn't have anything to do with FOSS but is just the free samples model taken to the extreme.
FOSS is completely irrelevant to the viability commercial websites (or other services) but yet you see the same problems there - ads, dark patterns, attempts to lock in users so they can be fleeced.
What is your alternative?
Information wanted to be free, for the first decade of the web's existence. Projects like Linux, Wikipedia, the www itself. These open, free ways of doing things were proving a case for optimism.
They were so much faster & better than corporate alternatives that you couldn't help but expecting that open projects had the competitive advantage.
Meanwhile, online culture was very different. There was room for morons and blowhards, touts, spammers and occasional shill... but those people didn't run the show.
• All the world's people will effortlessly be able to communicate and collaborate together? Surely this will bring about an age of open-mindedness and harmony!
• The bulk of the world's information will go digital, and become accessible to anyone? Surely this will relegate ignorance and superstition to problems of the past!
I've never considered myself an optimist, but if someone back then had predicted the internet we have today, I would have written them off as a hopeless cynic.
That was the first mistake.
Free products don't have a "competitive advantage". They destroy market segments. "Free" is the area denial tactical nuke[0] of business. "Free" is the singularity of business models - as price approaches 0, math starts to break out, and the local fabric of the market unravels. "Free" turns competition into a race for growth.
Being "open source" is optional here. Which is why it's not F/OSS that won on the general market, "free with ads" did. F/OSS is mostly used as a weapon to deny market segments to competitors, forcing them to either leave or play the same "free"/growth game. This is used both offensively, to break into existing market segments, as well as defensively, to "pull the ladder behind you".
--
People will pay when it gets them something they value, but the moment someone offers that for free, completion on price of that thing becomes impossible. Instead, competition moves to ancillary aspects of a thing, such as e.g. delivery, or integrations, or lifestyle marketing.
Case in point: neither Amazon nor Audible compete with libraries on just letting you read books - they compete on delivery (ease of access).
"Salted" or not -- it's up to supporters of free markets/capitalism to figure their shit out.
My GitHub is very rusty, but I'm delaying Open source plans until I have a fully time job. It's just not worth it for me otherwise to try and be this FOSS advocate while I can't keep things stable in my own backyard.
What if it's empty because you don't want to feed even more code into the deep learning grinder?
Hell, what if it's empty simply because you're selfish and you don't like sharing?
Extreme poverty is down to almost nothing.
Polio is all but eradicated.
Many types of cancer, death sentences just 20 years ago, are treatable. HIV is practically curable.
You can learn anything you want on YouTube, Wikipedia, and the wider web with time and effort, for free. (The TFA acknowledges this.)
I'm not saying there aren't huge problems. The benefit, to paraphrase, is not evenly distributed. But in nearly every sense it's better to have been born in the 90s than the 60s.
We can and should discuss lack of regulation, legal-but-wrong tax evasion, societal risks, there's plenty of bad to go around. But put it in context - there's a lot of good to go around too.
However, I don't see how any of those are relevant to the points being made by the article, as none of the technology companies, nor VC financiers, mentioned in it had a hand in solving those problems.
The idealism has been bled out of big tech, and it now mostly only revolves around capturing eyeballs and efficiently selling people badly made stuff they don't need.
In my opinion, small tech is where the future lives.
> there is a worrying trend of Tech veering strongly to the right and using the money they get from us and our data for questionable causes.
Tech may have ... not given the election outcome leftists wanted. Twice! It now appears tech will not lead to a communist/socialist utopia, and so they are now the enemy. And so, they will, read the paragraph after this statement:
> The point of all of this is to say: the tech utopia fantasy is truly dead to me. The image of the cool, hippie, leftist Silicon Valley tech is wrong. The companies themselves and the VC’s they take money from are supporting values and governments that do not act in your best interest and do not even align with their marketing image. Don’t be further misled. Stop giving them your money, time and data as much as possible for you. They won't bring us closer to these ideals they promise.
This paragraph comes after more than a page of text pointing out that tech DID in fact, bring a lot of parts, some would say most, of tech utopia.
Frankly, I'm pretty damn sure that the actors responsible for the swing to the right are not FANGs, and not even Twitter. The fact that the world has changed and that China, Russia and Iran ... and "that" ideology's extremists ... have started cooperating and have become a real, serious threat to the lives of billions of people, and are actively killing millions ... I feel that has a lot more to do with the current situation than either Facebook or Amazon. Combined with the failure of governments to keep the economic growth of the past 10 years going (e.g. housing, ...)
Like saying YC "CEO, Garry Tan, is known to be vitriolic online, anti-progressive" who you can witness here saying "great outcome for San Francisco. A near clean sweep of moderate Dems" https://x.com/garrytan/status/1854048895162347672
I mean that's another reason for the "swing right" if people favouring moderate dems are denounced as anti-progressive.
Also re a big tech swing to the right, I don't recall the old big tech like IBM and Dow Chemical being a paradise of woke hippies.
> “Fuck Chan Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a label and motherfucking crew,” he wrote in a since-deleted post on X, formerly Twitter, to his 408,000 followers during the early morning hours of Saturday. “Die slow motherfuckers.”
> When a user noted that Tan seemed drunk, he responded he was. “You are right,” he replied, “and motherfuck our enemies.”
> Tan also posted a picture of a private liquor cabinet — containing two $350 bottles of Balvenie and Macallan whisky and two $32 bottles of Roederer Estate sparkling wine — above a plaque emblazoned with his name: “Garry Tan ‘SF Social Media Troll’ Twitter Menace.”[1]
[1] https://missionlocal.org/2024/01/garry-tan-death-wish-sf-sup...
The only surprise is how many intelligent people still believe that utopia is just a few more lines of code away.
What technology can't do is get rid of power structures entirely. There will still be a controlling class. It just will be made up with different people.
And in US plantations, the technological innovation of the "Cotton Gin" allowed existing plantation owners to expand and increase the use of slaves.
(I don't think these disprove your point, but there's a lot more going on with your specific examples than one would think)
[1] https://www.vox.com/2016/5/18/11691818/barone-mocetti-floren...
That’s life. Life is war against entropy and for the individual at least entropy always wins. We die.
The Internet made countless things better and a few things worse. We notice the things it made worse because humans have a powerful negativity bias, probably because this was adaptive. “Mistake a bush for a lion and you’re fine, but mistake a lion for a bush and you’re dead.” Your ancestors were paranoid enough to survive.
Edit: I do want to add one point on which I am sympathetic. Unfortunately it seems as if politics is a thing the Internet made worse. That’s dangerous because governments have a monopoly on force. Restoring some kind of sane not-hyper-polarized political discourse is probably an existential problem.
I don't think it's just a systems problem. Sure, systems can help, but education is even more important. Recognizing it's terrible is valuable too (I hope most people have recognized that...).
I recommend Julia Galef's Scout Mindset[1] as an inspiration for the kind of change that I believe is needed. (perhaps the most book of the 3rd millenium? :P ) We need to boost our immunity against fake news and extreme discourse. Information now is what is decisive, and viral (and wrong, misleading, hateful, etc.) information can spread very quickly.
Apart from that, more compassion in general. We're very good at teaching kids about "productive" things they are interested in, but very poor about ethics and meta things, like compassion for fellow beings, the importance of a peaceful and kind discourse to the survival of civilization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scout_Mindset
> Utopias are always fantasies. All of them.
Historically utopia had this association. But I think if an utopia is impossible, then it's less interesting. There has to be something achievable that's worth striving for. It's not going to be perfect of course, but I'm confident it exists somehow.
I also think Utopia is as much as about the small as the big. Tolkien famously had his utopia in the Hobbit way of living, with a simple, relatively wealthy, relatively peaceful society -- but with great interpersonal relationships and all the little things (literally :) ).
Polarization (as the word implies) is not outcome of the tech but side-effect of two-party system.
People definitely latch on to the negatives, and that is in itself a big part of the problem of social media type platforms today.
Sure there's misinformation etc, but I'd much rather what we have today - it's not perfect, but it is so much easier to learn topics, so many more resources, and no not everything is free, but a lot of it is, and at least the paid resources exist!
I'm also glad that we do have people raging and seeing the negatives too. We need these people as a way of finding balance, and I'm sure as a system we'll regress to a mean and everything will be ok.
I do relate to seeing elders feeling a sense of bliss upon using WhatsApp to connect to relatives living far away, or friends/acquaintances they couldn't keep in touch with anymore (99% of the time due to age-related issues).
But otherwise, if I'm using a program from a company, and the company goes out of their way to control how I use that program, then they likely never had my best interest as a priority in the first place. Sometimes, using such programs is not a choice, or it comes with significant personal/financial cost for the users. But deriving something actionable from this reasoning is hard - policy makers are either to detached from technical details, are actively working against your interest due to corruption, or cannot agree on what the right direction is. I don't have a solution, besides giving some of my time and money to organizations who have consistently acted on the best interests of users, such as the Free Software Foundation, EFF, the Tor Project, etc.
I think it depends what the "old days" are for each generation.
For me it is the early days of the Internet becoming widely available, late 80s to early 90s. Suddenly everyone I know has email, everyone is on usenet, I can talk (i.e. text chat) with anyone around the world.
Which of course we can today. But back then there were no corporations involved (commercial use of the Internet was prohibited), so no marketing involved, it was all real people.
And to me this is a key part:
> if I'm using a program from a company, and the company goes out of their way to control
This wasn't a thing. All the communication protocols were open standard (RFCs), the implementations were open source. Every program I used (aside from the OS, which was the domain of proprietary software back then) was one I compiled myself and could modify or rewrite to taste. So it was just us, regular people, who owned and controlled how everything worked and the possibilities were unbounded and thus extremely exciting.
Today mostly we're stuck using proprietary software/apps, or even worse, the "cloud" where the companies control everything.
As much as I can, I still want to control my environment so I stick with open standards like email instead of proprietary chat apps, and I run Linux & FreeBSD, and I avoid phones like the plague since there is no way to own anything on a phone platform.
At first, Google was very idealistic in its mission, perhaps even doe-eyed in the manner expressed in the article: no defensive patent portfolio to match their level of innovation (until Apple went "thermonuclear" on Android, and started an internecine patent war); open GTalk XMPP federation (until Facebook extracted GTalk users' "social graph[1]" without giving any data back). No internal data controls so that employees could to innovate quickly, trusting they'd do the right thing (until an engineer harassed SF Bay Area teenagers he knew IRL using their Google data), and so on. No technology can win against the human condition.
1. At a time when the hype for social graphs was a little higher than it is for AI now, and Google viewed its battle with Facebook as existential.
Anyone who thinks ANY publicly traded company acts in YOUR best interest (unless YOU are serious shareholder) is in the words of my 11-year old kid - delulu :)
What did you think you would obtain by giving technology to a bunch of horny, aggressive and fear-driven monkeys? Other than making monkeys more effective at making each other horny, aggressive and afraid?
What did we expect? That the year 2000 was magically going to bring about a golden age?
But that's not accurate. Post WWII up until the mid 70s saw an explosion of middle class earnings and relative wealth, and a large shrinking of wealth inequality in the US.
Italian Economic Miracle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_economic_miracle
Japanese Economic Miracle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_economic_miracle
Spanish Miracle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_miracle
Miracle on the Rhine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtschaftswunder
In all of these cases real incomes grew enormously. Yes, a big part of that was starting from a low base after the destruction of WWII. But I'd argue it was also a strong consequence of the technology of the time: the was an explosion in consumer goods enabled by new tech, but companies still needed lots of employees to create these products. In the past ~25 years I believe tech has instead allowed more wealth to accrue to a smaller and smaller subset of people.
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
was not meant ironically.
It's hard to explain how _cool_ Google was circa 2000-2010 or so. How they genuinely seemed a bit cyberpunk and they had figured out how to do cool amazing things and make money and not be evil.
Sadly, it was not to be. But maybe I was just a naive teenager.
It wasn't until the post-9/11 mobile revolution and normies embracing the internet (late 2000s) that things took a hard turn for the worse. I was honestly surprised (shouldn't have been), and now sorry I didn't do anything to reverse the trend.
We need a well-capitalized organization to keep general-purpose computing alive, along with privacy, security, and autonomy. There are lots of little organizations of course, but they are unfocused and operate like ants in a realm dominated by BigTech giants.
---- Reply to below, I can no longer post for the next hour: ----
Right. Unfortunately I don't have the capital, but would love to work on the problem... even for free/cheap in my spare time. And will.
For example, been testing the new Starlite tablet with Phosh... and it is soooo close! I'm about to start learning how to develop for it. But it would go faster if say... starlabs, purism, system76, pine, riscv companies, FLOSS peeps would collaborate more effectively. They do to some extent, but don't often push in the same direction.
One major problem is the quality of documentation of interfaces. One of those boring things most don't want to do without a paycheck. Despite decades of experience with Linux I don't (yet) know where to start with wayland, dbus, gstreamer, gtk, etc. A book that pulled all this together for developers would be a big enabler. Think it would need to be sponsored as it won't be sustainable on its own.
I think this doesn't leave enough blame at more technical people embracing the same platforms as normies. After years of bulletin boards and forums where people built up small communities online, everyone migrated to behemoths that actively undercut any chance of that kind of community (examples including Facebook's restrictive interfaces and aggressive push to merge personal and online lives, Twitter's character limit, Reddit's tree-based ranked discussion structure or its obliteration of any iota of personalisation to profiles). Even with the current BlueSky boom it's wild that so many techies tried to persevere with Twitter in the last few years (the boosting of subscribers to the top of all replies should've been instant death).
The few forums I was on back then that actually survived that mass migration are _still_ around and some of the only fun parts of the internet.
not an expert at all but maybe if ipv6 was embraced it'd result in people returning to doing a lot more grassroots stuff and just by being fun it'd massively challenge the grimness of the last 10 or so years of an increasingly restrictive online experience.
To further subdivide the techie contingent, lots of them have no problem using Windows even though Linux/FLOSS has been viable for a decade or two. So even most techies don't care about the problem.
Unfortunately, that worldview died with 9/11.
Did it? I personally feel the pervasive optimism lived on in the zeitgeist until about 2015 or 2016. And to be clear, I'm not saying that Trump being elected is what ended it; rather, I believe it was the hyper-polarization (already being talked about by then) of that election that really quashed it.
I don't think it did. The utopian optimism of tech changing the world for the better epitomized much of the 2000s and 2010s. Neither did the author of the featured article, which is referring to the current day as the death of tech utopianism, even though I don't think they argued this point well, considering that they simply pointed towards a selection of high profile examples of right wing members in tech as evidence of the demise of utopian optimism overall.
I think that's very much an insider's view, the sentence is in particular funny because "cyberpunk" is not exactly a term of endearment. Mike Pondsmith and William Gibson are hardly disenchanted Zoomers or Millennials. I think Google still does seem a bit cyberpunk, and I don't mean it as a compliment.
I think the John Barlow, cyberlibertarian school of thought had always more to do with what's later been dubbed the "Californian Ideology" rather than technology per se. I don't think it was ever a mainstream view.
I don't think an embrace of cyberpunk ideas, whatever those are, was entirely mainstream, but the idea that the world was opening up, the internet interpreted censorship as damage and routed around it, and it would help bring down dictatorships, was definitely in the ether.
The historical trend is for improvements followed by lulls. But we never can predict in advance how far the improvements will go. We do feel that there was a lot left on the table.
And regressions to the mean. Wealth inequality and fascism come to mind.
Hindsight's cynicism is the enemy of understanding history in this case, obviously there was no golden age, but at the time the graph was going up, and money and not just the promise of an easy life but constant stories of people making it big because of their skills (unlike, say, crypto) made a lot of people go "this time it'll be different". And because in a rare few cases it was, everyone bought into it.
Personally I can name both areas where tech improved my life beyond expectations (not having to live near work for one) as well as huge disappointments (such as people willingly choosing to believe lies en masse despite truth becoming easily accessible).
Technology changes, people don't.
Related: http://nobodyscores.loosenutstudio.com/index.php?id=556
I think it's simpler than that: we sold out.
Tech in the 80s and 90s was the land of curious geeks who played with it because it was interesting, or because they had a goal they wanted to enable. But once tech became a powerhouse of investment, it became taken over by investors, financiers, and the kind of geeks who would play ball with them.
Some of them drank the kool-aid and became financiers themselves, corrupted by the same forces that corrupt bankers or politicians. Some of them sold out because hey, ping-pong table in the office, that's pretty cool! evil never has ping-pong tables! Some of them sold out because times are hard and they wanted a job. And some of them don't realize they have sold out, because tech culture does a very good job of propagandizing selling out as a virtue.
In the 70s, we saw many people really believing in astrology, flat-earth and doing all they can to be stupid. There was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are society "heros".
When I was in school (public), classes were divided into "Smart", "Average" and "remedial". That disappeared in the 70s because parents did not want their kid put into remedial classes. So what happened ? Many smart kids were bored out of their mind in class and the "cool" kids acted stupid to get attention. So many kids started following that coolness trend and ended up dumb by not learning anything.
So here we are.
Is this true today? It's repeated pretty often, but I have my doubts. It almost seems like it's one of those things that gets repeated through the years ("back in the day, it was cool to be smart, but now we have Idiocracy IRL") over and over.
I might be wrong, but I'm guessing I'm on the younger side here (given your reference to the 70s), having graduated college a few years ago. From looking at my generation and interacting with our successors I get the impression that culture has (for a long time now) kinda shifted towards it being fine and good (if not cool per se) to be smart / a nerd / whatever. If anything it seems like, IDK, 70s and 80s? pop culture had the whole "the jocks vs. the nerds" thing, there were stereotypes of smart people having no friends, it was a social death sentence to have a geeky hobby, etc. That doesn't seem like it's the case anymore. Part of this is probably down to schools not really having centralized, stereotypical "popular kids" anymore, but if I had to pick out popular people from my high school, they were plenty smart. And it was never seen as uncool or weird (outside of jokes) to play video games, play DnD, do theater or robotics, or whatever.
The way people talk about this stuff you'd think the whole 80s movie stereotype of "he's reading a book, what a nerd!" and giving someone a swirly still exists in real life. I don't think I ever saw anything close to that, nor do I ever get that impression from people younger than me. Obviously, this is all super regional and dependent on socioeconomic groups and all that stuff, but I'm just sharing my perspective.
There is, of course, a distinction between being smart/nerdy/geeky/whatever and having crappy social skills. They overlap, obviously (and probably correlate), but they are distinct. The latter was never cool or admirable, and I wonder if people miss that and conflate the two.
Some faculty members were accredited as faculty at a local college, so students could take college classes once they finished high school classes --- it was not uncommon for students to graduate from high school and also be awarded a four-year college degree.
Apparently, the Mississippi State Supreme Court ruled it an illegal educational system since it conferred an advantage on those students who were able to take advantage of it, without a matching compensation for those students who weren't.
Or that nerds are not immune to become "bullies and autocrats and sleazebags" themself. I mean, why should love for technology, translate into consistent love for people?
Because so many nerds were treated badly and should know better, how to behave, once in power?
Sadly it is quite known, that people who suffered are likely to cause suffering as well, unless they really processed it all.
So it is a good thing, that therapy looses its stigma. Because people can change as well.
Capitalism increasingly incentivizes (and normalizes) deception as it struggles to squeeze the remaining profits, since the rest have trended toward zero as Marx warned they would. From this stems "enshitification" and other perverse incentives like influencer culture, etc.
An ideal society of the future would allow all information to be freely available. All structures of organization would be transparent, and commonly agreed upon goals would take precedence above all else, instead of the goals dictated by the .01 or .001 percent.
https://jacobin.com/2019/03/sam-gindin-socialist-planning-mo...
Real bullies knew how to make it fun for everybody, so that even the person being bullied had to laugh at it. Nerd bullies are just anti-social and boring.
gopher://sdf.org
gemini://sdf.org and gemini://gem.sdf.org
I already moved my personal WEB Site there, and there is interesting content there. Maybe "we" should migrate there and leave the LOL cats to the WEB :)
Some nerds were autocrats and sleazebags but they just needed to gain dominance for those traits to appear.
Technically, the iphone is very good and should have made things better.
But what it actually did was to set an example of control over the user that propagated throughout all of computing. People no longer had control over their own device.
People who bought an iPhone were unable to install their own software without permission from apple. And apple didn't give permission, destroying general computing.
Additionally, apple DID give permission to app creators and advertisers to do things on the phone. More than the person who owned the phone could, in fact against their interests. We've never recovered.
This.
There has always been a distinct classism in human society: one class has always been able to do certain things to the other class, but not the other way around.
Right now the latest addition is mass surveillance and spying. Governments and corporations know everything about you but you can't really know anything about them except what they want you to know.
Only through bloody revolutions did the classes ever change places if at all, or at least get shaken up and mixed a little, but there's never going to be a revolution again, because the might of arms on one side is the most disproportionate it has ever been.
We didn’t need the bullies and autocrats to discover technology. They were among us the whole time. We just didn’t take them seriously.
I mean not having social skills, not identifying with women or not treating them as fellow human beings, not having empathy for non-tech users etc, being obsessed with technology, sometimes at the expense of their humanity. I'm not excusing myself btw here either.. but as I get older I see our own community can be as toxic as any other, what I mean is I'm not laying the blame on outsiders but our own-selves. Power and Money corrupts anyone.
Sure I loved pcs, and programming, got bullied as a youth and I wasn't into sports but that doesn't make me any more or less likely to want to 'Make the world a better place' with tech.
Honestly 'Silicon Valley' the tv show, took out much of the wind and visionary magic that the real Silicon Valley was viewed as over 10 years ago. And subsequent actions of the real valley have not proven it false but a resounding and biting commentary on the culture
These days we have Tech Bro culture, immense tech layoffs, offshoring of work, Doomscrolling and tech which splinters humanity instead of binding it, consigns people to contract menial work at the whim of an algorithm and uses AI to generate art and music while human artists get locked out proper reward for their efforts .. I can definitely see how many in the younger generations are looking at Big Tech as being just as evil as Big Oil
The 90s nerds were fucking malevolent. They’re the ones that built the dystopia we are currently experiencing.
I know, I was one of them and I had a first row seat for a lot of this stuff.
Seriously, all this Musk talk stopped being funny years ago, when people started believing and regurgitating all that bullshit with a straight face.
"Tech Bro culture" is another Yeti - everyone is an expert on it, no one actually saw it. It's just a strawman from early culture wars that gives people another way to hate each other. It's perfect for cementing groups and gaining power in them, and for increasing advertisement exposure. It's really, really bad for one's sanity.
Techno utopia failed for a simple reason: people keep imagining what is possible with technology, but what actually materializes in the real world is what's possible under current economy. "Bicycles for the mind", tricorders, Mars colonies - they don't make money, so they don't happen. Instead, we get eshittification, and innovative blends of finance and medical insurance, and ad-funded social media.
For all his issues, Musk actually performed two miracles - revitalizing the space sector by making the business case for launches add up (a first piece of serious progress in space exploration since the Space Shuttle program), and dragging the market kicking and screaming into accepting BEVs as a serious, mass-market product. In both cases, the miracle part wasn't tech - it was making the economics work (including fighting the already established efficiencies).
> I can definitely see how many in the younger generations are looking at Big Tech as being just as evil as Big Oil
Because it is, and I wish more people understood it exactly for what it is. Key insight - it has nothing to do with tech, everything to do with business. The technology itself isn't a problem - the problem is that we allow (and encourage) entrepreneurs to engage in the same immoral business practices, the same abusive business models, that previously defined Big Oil, and later on several other Big industries.
I guess the mistake was that nerds assumed there were more people like them, or that introducing people into their world would change the people and not have the people change the environment.
The thing with stupid people overcoming the internet was not corporations investing on publicity nor searching engines selling the rankibgs of searching results. What made stupidity feel safe on internet and become trending, were the spaces that allowed those people to gather, to be in "the same place" with no one there to judge, correct them and laugh at them for being ignorants. This gave them the wrong idea that they were relevant in a sense were despite knowing nothing about anything, their opinion was valid and deserved respect, as much as the opinions from experts.
I think the bloom came off the flower for me when I participated in the design discussions for Freenet, and I started actually looking at what people were uploading.
Those nerds from 90s became autocrats and sleezbags of today.
Well yeah nerds that did not get shitloads of money like Zuckerberg or Musk or Bezps did not turn into autocrats ;) but yeah money change people.
I, for one, am glad the networks became easier and more accessible. I wouldn't be here otherwise.
> The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the 1870s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the only nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news.. Western Union carried Associated Press reports exclusively.. When the major channels for moving information are loyal to one party, its effects, while often invisible, can be profound.
Please spare me from this bullshit. You are free to go back to that cave.
I'm excited for what the future brings, and I'm still amazed by how sudden jump there was of ability of LLMs. It's still crazy to me.
I think that may be a bit biased. There was also Threads, Terminator 2, Blade Runner, Robocop, Planet of the Apes, Escape from New York, Brazil, Mad Max and the like.
Reality is probably somewhere in the middle.
In the 90s, while I didn't believe tech would bring about a "utopia", I did believe tech would be a very positive, powerful force in human society. The Internet was supposed to "bring us all together" when it made it easy for us to communicate without boundaries. It would cause the fall of authoritarian regimes as societies had freer access to knowledge.
In a major sense, though, the exact opposite has happened. Social media has torn us apart. Authoritarian regimes have discovered how they can control their people with rage bait and blind patriotism. And most importantly, from a personal perspective, I so often see tech not about improving the human condition, but how we can better addict people through dopamine scrolling, or insert yourself as a middleman in "winner take all" economics. In short, I've become intensely disillusioned about the positive power of tech, and that's a tough pill to swallow after dedicating the majority of my career to tech (and, transparently, I see the role I played as often part of the problem). I'm just very sad with how it all turned out.
I think this is blaming the outgroup. 'We' are the problem, too.
But on the other hand, this isn't about me trying to persuade you, or you trying to persuade me. This is about a corporation (pick one) with a revenue base that matches many countries, spending a good chunk of that revenue on the best persuasive techniques and technologies the human race can produce, microtargeting each one of us to click the link, and draw from our eyeballs seconds of our time. The cost to us is small, that the side-effect is warping our perceptions of the world is something the corporation doesn't care about.
We're living in that shadow of H.P. Lovecraft's Great Old Ones - vast, inhuman things that reshape us and our world without any care or understanding.
From what I remember everything about that decade was full of unrealistic optimism (end of history etc)
My bigger fear of tech is how it’ll marginalize people economically and centralize power. We see it already with companies like Amazon. But the coming wave of automation over everything - manufacturing, entertainment, etc - may be far more damaging than even social media. Unfortunately right now it seems our political and economic systems are completely inadequate in preparing for this.
Can you describe how transparency over government has increased (by social media)?
The positive power we were attributing to the technology itself back in the '90s was really just the expression of the intentions and worldviews of the people who were using it back then, which was a self-selected and decisively non-representative sample of humanity.
After a couple of decades of tech usage expanding more and more broadly, we've seen a regression to the mean that puts Eternal September to shame, and we've discovered that the mean really is quite mean.
A lot of people disillusioned by this are unfortunately not disillusioned enough, and instead of taking things to their logical conclusion (that utopianism applied to the world at large is not just unattainable, but destructive, and improvement only comes from fostering a great plurality of local contexts so that at least some of them can diverge positively from the global mean) they want to transfer their utopian aspirations to some other global project.
Unfortunately, that other project is often politics, and if you think that failed utopianism in the tech world has had a bad result, just wait until you see the level of havoc that failed utopianism in the political sphere can wreak! Well, we don't have to wait for it -- the past hundred years of history provide copious evidence.
Ok so I'm curious about this.
In the broad strokes, did you think tech would be a major facilitator to things like unionization drives, campaigns to fight for and protect civil liberties, everyday citizens organizing together to gain a greater representation in their local government, etc.?
Or, again in the broad strokes, did you think tech would largely replace the need for these kinds of activities?
Never had this. Maybe a little bit about GNU and Linux; that's about it. Good to see someone sobering up.
OSS is founded as much on what it rejects as what it embraces.
Specifically, "Digital Inclusion" was a term I remember from before smartphones became popular, and how important it was to get everyone on board. Well, smartphones were what brought internet to them, and this progress was celebrated.
With Social Media it was a bit more complicated, as it only became accessible to the general population of poorer countries at the same time it started receiving criticism internationally. They don't remember Myspace.
(EDIT: Maybe you're talking about the article in general, but the paragraph the text you quoted comes from is about smartphones, social media and internet)
GNOME is a great example of this -- they're constantly removing functionality over the objections of their actual userbase in order to implement features that fit the speculative needs they project onto people who don't -- and likely never will -- use the software.
That is why saner countries have real consumer protection laws that make sure prices can be compared without a calculator.
The Internet was among many things that came with the latest wave. Idealists believed they were so clever to snatch back their freedom. Govs believed they are so clever to pervert the Internet to their own ends. But it's a poison pill that takes a century to act.
It's not a secret that there's a joint effort from all sides to unite the humanity. Some of the powerful want to create a tyranny we cannot escape, others want to create a paradise. But in one thing they agree: the wars must end. The state structures disagree, of course, as wars is their lifeblood, and right now they believe they can prevent this united humanity utopia. So the states were given this shiny new thing - the Internet - generously peppered with the magic powder of survelliance, and the states, unable to resist the urge, swallowed this shiny thing and they are still busy chewing it. In the meantime, the Internet slowly grows inside them, driven by its spirit of connecting everything together.
The coming wave will radically empower the Internet and at the end of this half-century cycle the states will realise what the Internet really was.
Let's all build Internet services on open standards and join all sorts of things together.
Tech in 2024:
Guess what suckers!
Internet is a TV form the 80s/90s. Mindless, soulless engagement machine we all stare into.
Whatever you believe it seems clear that one's experience of life and the world is dominated by inner experience and mental well-being, not by luxuries or technological convenience. One could live in a palace, drive flying cars and so on but still suffer dreadfully.
Although my personal disposition is fairly sunny, verging on the manic, my model of how the world and how my life works is not one of optimism but rather a series of defeats occasionally punctuated by an unexpected victory. Sort of like the fall of the Berlin Wall or how Gollum accidentally destroyed the ring. Eucatastrophe was Tolkien's name for it.
With the decline of Christianity people of the West are now more demotivated than at any time in their history. Our religion was never about knowledge but it did guard the conditions under which the growth of knowledge was possible. Not saying traditional Christianity is the answer however we've thrown out the baby with the bathwater.
I thought techno-optimists/technocrats fully acknowledge the inevitable presence of bad actors, but believe that with a proper design they would be unable to do any significant harm. Am I wrong?
Of course, whenever such designs are possible in reality is a whole different issue (and the reason for a lot of disappointment). I’m merely surprised by this idea that bad actors are somehow not noticed.
No major technological leap has been happened disrupting social structures, putting people out of jobs, or causing some sort of moral panic. https://pessimistsarchive.org/
Nearly all of them have dramatically benefited humanity in the long term. Your children will live healthier and longer, with fewer extremes of suffering.
The drama over AI, in my opinion, simply separates those who think long-term from those who don't. On a long enough timescale, issues like hallucination, theft of artistic IP, etc are a total non-issue.
I think it's arguable the anti-AI movement is much more selfish than the pro-AI one. I don't care if I lose my job to create AGI, because the benefit to humanity is worth much more than my job.
The plethora of gadgets, gizmos and sights and sounds that painted my perception of the 90s and 00s just felt like the way it was, until it wasn’t.
My whole family now works from home in their pajamas, gets anything they want delivered next day to their door, and has access to all the knowledge in the world literally in their pocket. Is that utopia? I don’t know. But it sure beats life in the 1990s.
I lived in a very similar suburb in the '90s and had many, many other kids to play with outside every day. Bicycling, sports, adventures, you name it…
For them, I am 100% positive that 2024 does not beat 1994. They all seem so ridiculously lonely.
GP is correct that life today "beats" that from the 90s -- as far as convenience/friction is concerned.
OTOH, just like how "sitting is the new smoking", a 100% frictionless life is not better in every way. It atrophies several important faculties like the ability to deal with boredom (or people who aren't exactly your type), focus for long periods of time on work, etc.
Viewed from this perspective (and as a parent myself), I agree that 2024 does not beat 1994.
Boycott is a start, it's an easy demand to put forward. I doubt it's enough, so I'd suggest adding two classics once you've recruited and become regulars with some boycotters: mutual aid and direct action.
Generally speaking, if you place anything under close scrutiny, you will catch yourself (assuming you're human) like the ouroboros - the serpent consuming its own tail. You can't escape the flaws of your own perception and your nature.
All other things, including praising technology and envisioning a better future, are just the tip of the iceberg. People will never find solace outwards unless they turn their focus in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, this is impossible for society in our capitalist, highly materialistic world.
For me, optimism still provides a lot of value in my worldview. The beliefs that have changed the most for me in the last 25 years is the limits and boundaries of what tools can do for us.
Technology ‘fixing humanity’ (when that ‘fixing’ is based on your own personal value system) is certainly a fools errand. But that limitation shouldn’t get in the way of imagining a utopia which is worth having.
Sure, I miss my childhood feelings of the 90s. But I also never expected a techno utopia to be ‘easy’.
This is especially ironic when the author expresses skepticism of the social benefit of smartphones in paragraph 2, as if no company in particular made them.
That's a strange interpretation of a citation of the last footnote, as if I hadn't read the entire article.
> those efforts are not enough
But I'm stating that those so-called "efforts" are mostly just propaganda to whitewash the vast amount of bad done by the perpetrators and can only naively be interpeted as using "their money for good".
I realize that my "lowering the barrier" statement comes off as if I think we should support inclusive technology or that I don't believe in democratization of tech- Im all for inclusivity, but we have not actually reached a state of democracy.
Maybe projects like Framework, Mastodon, et al are showing us what the next cycle may be and can be a more positive way of moving forward?
People got excited when our tech solves their real problems. It looks we've been in a plateau since before the Covid with a couple of exceptions.
But I wonder how many people have had a change of heart, and how much is just the influx of younger people and others with different opinions. Now that tech went through a "glamorous" phase, and is still in a "lucrative" phase, it certainly has a much broader draw.
It's fine for people to update their beliefs with their experiences, I'm just curious if the cause is that vs new people with different beliefs. I haven't really been on social media (other than curated subreddits and HN, I suppose), and I have a lovely wife and children and lots of real life time, too, so I feel like I don't doom scroll or anything. I wonder how much that's colored people's opinions vs first hand experiences.
As a simple example, the tech ethics question du jour when I was coming of age was whether it was okay to pirate music. Of course it was, it's free to copy bits! "You wouldn't download a car" etc. But I don't see a ton of daylight between that and training those songs on an AI model, but now generative AI is destroying those industries and musicians, etc. And HN these days seems largely against the AI training, while it was for pirating back then.
Or another example, slightly before that was the Clipper Chip and the government trying to regulate encryption for the safety and security of citizens, and the PGP guys being folk heroes for printing their source code in a book to take advantage of free speech protections and get around it. Whereas these days a good chunk of HN wants the government to regulate AI models for our own safety. This one is a bit of a stretch, but it feels like the problems "rhyme" at least.
I regularly see "posts from dissidents" here on HN, but I do notice that they are all strongly written, well-argued and often contain citations to support their position. Is there an asymmetry in the way karma is awarded to "bubble" and "non-bubble" positions? Probably, but that doesn't mean non-bubble never makes it.
Could it be that karma rewards different things than you believe?
I think this is because 10 or 20 years ago, when tech wasn't a particularly prestigious or high-paying career, you got into tech because you really believed in it, and so other people who were in tech also really believed in it - hence the optimism.
Today, most people in tech are in it because it pays well. Not only do they not believe in it - I suspect they begin to dislike it because they feel "forced" into it, as you might when doing anything you don't particularly enjoy for an extremely long amount of time.
What I find interesting is as tech has grown and people enter it who are not that interested in tech is you see tech’s influence seems to have gone further and further away from our industry niche.
Do I think VCs should be making decisions for millions of Americans so they can get more rich? No. Do I think tech workers should push a progressive narrative that the rest of the country should ascribe to? No.
Tech has an undue influence on the world on both the left and right. All of us mistakenly ascribe our unique situation as how the world should work. Maybe we should just focus on what we are good at?
Maybe I was just too young and inattentive 16 years ago, but before the GFC and Occupy, I don't think there was such a pessimistic narrative overall, and it only got worse over time.
A lot of people who criticize tech, like the author, would often excuse non-commercial or personal actors for doing the same thing (e.g. "regular people using LLMs are fine, big corporations using LLMs are bad"), which shows that they believe that "doing it for a profit" makes the moral difference. So it has nothing to do with tech at all, but rather whether or not the actor is doing it for a commercial purpose.
Compare this with advancements before then: Personal Computers, Internet, Smart Phones and they have had overwhelmingly positive impacts for the world.
So I see there being a completely legitimate reason to be negative about tech today but optimistic about its future.
https://pessimistsarchive.org/list/computer "Technology is making us uncivil", 1990
https://pessimistsarchive.org/list/television "Television addiction", 1977
https://pessimistsarchive.org/list/recorded-sound "A profit without honor", 1930 (https://external-preview.redd.it/Js-HSYL7H4FuXSQ-ZmSDXZ6uYZq...)
such as?
What’s happened is the utopian future turned into the dystopian present.
The technology created by Silicon Valley has profoundly harmed people and society in really visible ways.
That’s not all it’s done, it’s absolutely undeniable that it’s also been a driver of some extremely positive things.
But many people feel increasingly unable to live in this economy, take care of their children, find meaning, and achieve a state of balanced mental health. Many of these people place blame for at least some of this, correctly in my view, on the corrosive effects of the technology sector on the financial and labor markets as well as our personal day to day lives.
I fail to see what is so special about our current day and age, apart from us living in it.
such as?
It was possible to build tools that increased human happiness and connection, but by definition such tools would ultimately lead to each fulfilled person reducing engagement in the interest of actual face to face connection with others. There is no profit to be made in producing such a utility. It doesn't help that the human brain is addicted to novelty, meaning that a technical utility that did this cannot compete with utilities that are work primarily towards engagement.
Ultimately, we need critical faculties, emotional intelligence, and real community to negate the negative effects of engagement driven tech, but these are extremely difficult to develop when this technology is already driving the population towards the easy path: categorical "reasoning", emotional content, or just feeding vanity.
Ultimately, I think we had a small window when Facebook did a study in 2012, where it manipulated the emotions of a number of people (60k) and wrote a paper on it, to declare this practice of algorithmically managing content to be illegal psychological human experimentation.
We didn't, and now I really do feel we suffer under its shadow.
The application though, both by others and what I do at work? Meh.
So am I pessimistic about technology now? I think that's a valid way to put it. And yet I also feel "out of place in the tech world" with my viewpoint. Sure there's others with similar positions, but I feel this is not a majority.
Let's just hope there are enough people out there using these things wisely that the future will be a better place.
When I was younger, in my teen years (~2014-2020), I imagined the future only to be better than it was right now. The technology would only keep getting better. People would use the internet (especially social media) and become cleverer, less xenophobic, and more open to all kinds of cultures. We all would be getting richer, quality of life would only increase, no more wars, yadda yadda. It was so obvious that liberal democracy is the only right way forward, the pinnacle.
(when I say "we" I refer to the collective West)
I'm quite disappointed with how so many things are turning to shit right now. I know, I know, what I wrote above probably sounds like "the end of history", which has been recalled even by its originator by now. Nostalgia probably also plays an important role – things are much simpler when you're not an adult.
But still, we had a good thing. We had it all.
I keep hoping we will get back on track.
Don't call it a "computer" (computers are scary), call it a "smart" "telephone." Or call it a "device" as if it were a can opener.
Don't call it a "program" (programmers are geeks), call it an (ugh) "app" [which is just short for "application program" of course]
Never had one of those nefarious handheld treacherous computers, never will, thanks.
One key mistake the author makes is misjudging the average person
>They are people who need to game the attention economy by increasingly disrespectful and shocking content, gore, rage bait, dehumanizing pranks17, extreme consumerism like huge shopping hauls, sloppy large mukbangs, shredding lamborghinis18, gambling streams and websites19, game shows20 and more
If your tastes are more sophisticated, you may see the profusion of relatively puerile content on the internet as "gaming the attention economy" - but how do you know the average person doesn't just like watching mukbangs? And why shouldn't they?
In my view - you should get comfortable with the fact that people have different preferences to yours and judge based on outcomes rather than aesthetics.
The author complains about racism. Maybe it's easier to be racist nowadays. On the other hand, in the decades before the internet we had more race related shootings, bombings, etc. Maybe, net net, it's a good thing if the people who would've been forming a militia in the woods 30 years ago are instead posting racist memes on X.
Likewise it's harder to make a blog or your own website today. But, much easier to blow up on X, TikTok, YouTube etc. I just don't see the issue here. We have far more content creators and similar now than in the past.
None of the complaints seem that meaningful to me. Technology improves. Things aren't perfect (yet) - but they might be in the future. We have greater access to information, communication, and intelligence every year. If these trends persist we will use the improvements to enhance all other aspects of life (as we are already doing). The future where power comes from solar, nuclear, or fusion, physical labor comes from machines, cognitive labor comes from AI, material comes from space travel, advances in biology/physics/chemistry radically extend our life and health spans is not only possible, it is visibly approaching.
I just don't see what the issue is. If you turn off mukbangs it's not like the viewers are going to read Dostoevsky or invent a cure for cancer or something. They are going to do their next most preferred activity - watch reality TV until you turn that off, gossip with their friends, etc.
Some people like to do the class of activity that mukbangs are a member of. Rather than try to "cure" them we should make sure they have access to an unlimited stream of mukbangs - cause why not? In the short term they'll be satisfied, we'll be rich, and technological advancement will continue - until we're all in a VR heaven on a server in the Dyson Sphere in the sky.
In a lot of ways, I feel like this author still believes in (a slightly modified version of) the tech utopian fantasy. Do we really think that a) research is HARDER to access today than in the 2000s, and b) that the thing keeping sensationalized rage bait popular is paywalls around research papers?
Radio "shock jocks" etc.
Technology is treating me well and I hope that continues to be true for a long time. I mainly worry about the sociopolitical consequences of the mass disenfranchisement of the middle classes but the middle class is so folded in on itself that it’ll likely disappear in with a whimper and we’ll end up with a 3rd world level of inequality. While not as nice as more egalitarian societies they do largely continue to function with a surprising degree of stability.
The fact giants push modern and worse mainframes (the cloud/mainframe + mobile/dumb terminal) to retain control, "you'll own nothing", and to sell fast-tech crap instead of long lasting, partially upgradable desktops, does not meas that's the tech, it's just a commercial choice.
The main issue is not even technical but political: on one side giants needs slaves to prosper, so people who depend on them, who own nothing, who consume the 100% of what they earn in services and so on, while nature and the civil society needs Distributism. From the '900s -ism we have dropped most of such "giant-centric" way of thinking, it's about time do drop a bit more.
1. Sees things from an excessively American point of view. 2. Seems mostly to care about whether tech companies back his side in American politics or the other.
This is a global problem, and a lot of the problem is the concentration of power. The problem is not which side companies in a particular industry pick, but that which side they pick matters too much.
The tribalism of picking sides is part of the problem. Disparate issues get labelled "left" or "right" and everyone agrees with all the opinions on their side.
Well, to be fair, the movement that seems to have largely infiltrated the Republican party in the US is (openly) against democracy and prefers a concentration of power and subjugation of "others".
And it's a two-party first-past-the-post voting system so a vote for any alternative between the two ruling parties is effectively a vote for whichever party is least like them.
So it's against your own interest not to take part in the tribalism in the US.
Don't confuse hate for the republicans as support for the democrats
It is indeed an American POV that universal healthcare seems to come and go with the president, something unthinkable for other first world countries.
>The tribalism of picking sides is part of the problem.
Following up on the other response: if you got or know a coalition that can push more ranked choice voting in some states, I'm all ears. That's the only real way to affect this as any reasonable level.
Today, there are topics about which getting information is as difficult as ever, because there are only ads or misinformation what you can find easily.
Buying a new vacuum cleaner shouldn’t take hours or even days. And I shouldn’t need to learn all the technical details of them. But I need to because there is no trusted source of information, because almost everything is ads. I trust filtering to reddit less and less.
Figuring out what really happens in Ukraine and Gaza (or just in universities in America) shouldn’t be a week long research, because there is misinformation all the time, seriously everywhere, in every single newspaper, blog, website.
So not even the base idea is completely true, its supposed to be effect is even less true. The general populace has clearly less power than 20 years ago as you mentioned.
Buy a dishwasher and a washing machine.
Those mechanical techniques weren’t up to these more abstract tasks: why would it be reasonable to expect the new computational techniques to generalize immediately to these mechanical problems—much less that they’d immediately achieve better results than the time-tested incumbent techniques?
Although, of course, such work is very much underway, e.g. Physical Intelligence’s splashy promo ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098236 ; 14 days ago, 218 points, 189 comments)
It was never real.
Anybody in any of the tech companies mentioned (and many others) has always known.
You can buy groceries and social status with a fat paycheque and stocks. You can’t do the same with “just” a clean conscience.
This is not new. It is why a lot of people are interested in YC, and this forum as a result.
The problem with that system though is that it creates misaligned interests. As consumers, we want technologies that make our lives easier. But the people who are running the game - the people with money and therefore power - want to just make the extraction of value more efficient.
Social media exists to sell advertising against content you don't have to pay anyone to produce, and is therefore one of the greatest utopian ideas of capitalism. There is minimal material cost, labour costs are reasonable even when you pay 95th percentile compensation packages, and to boot you are seen as a media entity that powerful people want to influence, so you can help them influence others, thereby giving you access to all sorts of mechanisms to protect your value extraction machine.
The system is working as intended. This isn't a bug.
If you don't like it, you need to start supporting other economic systems within these industries. Technological utopia is still achievable, but not while the people building it are so absorbed by return on capital and extraction of value.
As a side point, Elon Musk borrowed money to pay $44bn for Twitter and seems intent on driving it into the ground, which we might all say is an example of the capitalist system self-correcting. Except since Trump got elected - the candidate he endorsed and heavily personally promoted on that platform - the value of Tesla has gone up over $200bn. That's not self-correction, that's the system working as designed. You need to decide for yourself if you think that's healthy for you and your descendants. I'm not convinced it is.
As someone who grew up in Silicon Valley in the 80s and 90s, this image confuses me.
- They both criticize ByteDance for pushing Russian propaganda, and Google for not pushing Russian propaganda (sorry, "censoring").
- Also criticizing people for having the "wrong" political persuasion is telling. I'm not American so I can only look in from the outside but if Donald Trump won so decisively, maybe the left needs to look inward at what they did wrong instead of blaming big tech for not supporting "their side" enough.
- Criticizing tech for being anti-regulation and anti-deceleration... If we regulate our own technology all that'll happen is that bad actors will leapfrog us. Maintaining technological superiority is a matter of survival for liberal democracies. Friendly reminder that 70% of the world population lives under dictatorships today and it's ever rising...
- The idea that social networks accelerate xenophobia is ridiculous. All it does it expose it. Also left-leaning westerners have this ridiculous idea that we're not the most progressive culture on earth. We are and it's not even close. There's literally race wars and modern day slavery all over the world.
- Labour conditions... It's obvious the author has never worked in a truly bad work environment. While their criticisms aren't unfounded, perspective is needed. The past was worse, things have gotten better.
IMO tech is still an overall net positive. It's what's enabled the earth to support so many people, even if power generation is higher and less efficient than we want, it's more efficient than it used to be. Even if the current geopolitical situation is getting spicy, most of human history was still worse...
This reads to me as a leftist having a meltdown over the current political state. The truth is, leftist governments brought this upon themselves. They thought that QE wouldn't lead to inflation because it didn't during the 2010s... However the economy then was otherwise deflationary. When those conditions ended, QE did what economists always knew it would, add inflationary pressure. And let's be real, most people vote based on economics. Left-leaning governments tried to gloss over the poor state of their economies with social issues that most people are ambivalent about at best and lost. Also millennials are the next largest cohort after boomers now. Even if the birth rate is lower than ever, a majority of millennial women have had at least 1 child. This changes voting demographics dramatically... The US left needs a bit of introspection instead of blaming everyone for their loss.
Maybe this person should try using tech for something positive. Or go outside and touch grass.
While I'm slightly ambivalent about LLMs, I do think that the promise of AGI has awakened something in the tech world... AI could usher in a new age, supercharge the economy, bring about a lot of positive change. Instead of whinging about the current state of politics, maybe think of positive uses for it. I'm personally using AI to build an app in the domain of finance and economics. I think AI could bring about a lot of economic benefits and change a lot of the things OP is complaining about.
And final thought. Depression is real. Currently it's -20 degrees celcius outside, there's a foot of snow on the ground and the wind is blowing. We lost our home to a wildfire this summer and spent much of the summer homeless (well, bouncing around various places anyway) with a toddler. My SO is East European, have lots of family within 1000km of Ukraine, have Ukrainian friends and family (even my own family, although they immigrated to the west long ago)... It's not like my life is without stress. But I'm still optimistic that tech can produce good in the world.
For sure. The lack of sleep is more than made up by the fact he's incredibly happy, cheerful, fun, and learns things everyday, all the time. And there is definitely more focus in my life knowing I need to provide a future for him... We're optimistic about the future.
This constant casting off of blame onto celebrity enemies is insidious. It's an acknowledgement that the Western upper-middle class will never change their lifestyles or values, just spend all of their "political" time looking for scapegoats, ceremonially killing them, and patting themselves on the back for it (want a Pulitzer? A Nobel?)
That's why Trump was at first revitalizing, because he was a sacrifice that refused to die, immunizing them from the fact that their invested wealth doubled during his presidency and the one that followed. The fact that he overcame their frowny faced disapproval and their willingness to abuse the legal system has left them in complete disarray: could it be that the problem is that they've become ridiculously wealthy while working increasingly parasitic jobs, rather than that tech billionaires are assholes? You work for them.
And none of them deregulated telecommunications, none of them deregulated the banks, none of them made at-will employment the standard. They're not the reason that I had three educational tv channels as a child, and now, for the past couple decades, the only one left in PBS has been fundraising with Deepak Chopra lectures. You've all become libertarians unless your lifestyle or aesthetic is bothered in any way, then you become authoritarians. Or in other words, you're narcissists.
The outsourcing of morality to voting and donating to Democrats is over. The elevation of that private group to a moral authority based on the fact that they were vaguely nice to black people from the mid-60s to the mid-80s, and that being drilled into every school age kid, has to be overcome. The party hasn't broken with Reagan, via that likely rapist, definitely sexual harasser that they platform at every convention, one that took a break from campaigning to execute a retarded black man. You shouldn't have ever left it to them, you did it because it was easy. It's not morality if it doesn't involve sacrifice.
Also, ask yourself the question: what do you do? Are you contributing to anything net positive in the world, or are you simply a facilitator for a middleman who lives through extracting value from the defenseless? Are you double-dipping by spending the cash of the people you make social capital out of publicly whining about?
The pieces are in place, it's just nobody has put them together.
AI /will/ be a net-benefit for humanity, even if it stopped progress as it currently is.
Besides excuses.