Due to similar bad timing I got my first Playstation right before the hack in the early 2010s that took down the Playstation network for a whole month. When they offered a make-good to their customers I didn't qualify because my account was too new. I never bought another Sony product again.
All well and good for now until the free lunch of free models ends, and the ones you can "freely" download have weights that tell you to drink Ovaltine or whatever other messaging gets sold.
We rightly restrict tobacco advertising because freedom to advertise is balanced with and does not always trump public health. Rights and responsibilities are not absolute, they exist in a complex tapestry of priorities.
Going from cable to streaming was a net increase in advertising because now the providers can make ads unskippable. (Also the ads are hypertargeted now.)
Going from traditional search to AI will echo that net worsening of ad-related user experience. The net surveillance is also greater because logged-out search will go away.
Maybe there's a general lesson that successive generations/disruptions of technology seem better at first but end up qualitatively worse.
A side effect of rapid technological change is that there are now multiple generations who didn't experience the pre-monetized internet.
It's like we've hit a tipping point where enshittification etc. are allowed to thrive because there's no longer a critical mass of people who know from first-hand experience that things don't have to be this bad.
It's become easy to pacify young people with the meme that older people didnt really have a better internet, they're remembering the past as better than it actually was.
People will eventually realize that they've become dependent on an increasingly expensive and worsening AI subscription in a way that echoes the worsening and rising costs of streaming services.
But the impact of depending on the tech giants for search and cognition and job skills will be significantly greater.
Why will employers five years from now pay for your $300 AI subscription when there exist other candidates who will absorb the cost themselves?
Social media has become so terrible in the last few years that I've grown to depend on it less without even making an effort to. I deleted my accounts on the worst sites and only visit anonymously, which has trailed off over time. I've joined newer/better sites but haven't let myself get attached to them. If they go away it won't feel like a big loss.
In that respect, the worsening of social media has been a gift. I'm still online but with the attitude of: "Don't ever let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner."
I would never be expected to clean my dishes after ordering room service in a hotel. The price of an AirBNB would have to be much cheaper than a hotel in order for me to do my own cleaning. And in my city at least, it never was.
Ironically (or fittingly) given that origin, the Xbox version of the Plex app may be the best one to use now because it's been abandoned and was never updated to the terrible redesign.
The new UI version never made it to the Xbox client so that's what I switched to using about 6 months ago. As a bonus, I got to ditch my Roku altogether.
I'm not expecting the people who take the vibecode shortcut to have the discipline and commitment and talent to steward their projects in the manner of the successful ones I've come to trust in the past.
To be that kind of rich you usually have to make not only your career but your life about making money. And then it becomes your self image. The illogical decisions happen because there's nothing left of you but continuing to make the number go up.
If the value of a house doesn't increase, then the property taxes, upkeep, mortgage interest, and selling fees would make home ownership untenable and worse than renting. And then if you rent the problem gets pushed up to the landlords anyway.
Zooming out of the intradecade view, all the power they have won't ever put gay and trans people back in the closet any more than they can reverse interracial marriage. And all the social media outrage about billionaires will do nothing to reverse wealth inequality.
The way I broadly think of it is that the left has won the culture and the right has won the economy. But not for the entire right, just the ultra rich.
I don't know if this guy is coming from a place of sadism, generic attention seeking, or social commentary aiming to call attention to the absurdity of treating AI as alive. If it's the third option it's at least well meaning, but it may be too inflammatory and crude like you said to have the right effect.
If someone thinks my taste in music is lame because I like Dave Matthews Band, I'll wear that. But if someone thinks I don't care enough about the quality of my output to produce it myself, that's a more real and tangible hit to my reputation.
There's some who might use AI as an outlet for nurturing sadism. But that's a very specific kind of person. A typical person will hopefully think about "torturing" an AI as being morally equivalent to torturing a pencil. That's more healthy than the danger we face of a potential mainstream view that AI shouldn't be treated badly because it has feelings and deserves rights.
It always surprises me that people can't take a step back and understand that objecting to today's progress is like objecting to women voting, or interracial marriage. You're just signing up to be mad your whole life and to be seen as a historical curiosity.