Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

just go back, car cdr your way into happiness.

take some wood a 2" display and pi zero and build something

tech has never been a solution to anything

The answer is that capitalism fucked it up, but since we were a capitalist country even in the 1970s to '90s, this obviously requires further analysis.

We didn't "win" the Cold War. Rich people did; working people lost. The rest of us are worse off than we were beforehand, and in the former Soviet bloc this is especially true: the Russian 1990s were even worse than the American 2020s (so far).

I'm no advocate for the Soviet system. It was deeply flawed and its eventual failure was not entirely caused by imperial aggression. That said, the USSR's existence was a boon for the American middle class. Whatever you think of communism, this is an objective fact. One of the reasons is that, during the Cold War, we needed research supremacy.

Both sides of the conflict were so scared of the other, they invested heavily in building a middle class, because that's where most of the research talent is going to come from--even if you're a staunch elitist who actually buys into upper-class meritocracy (a belief refuted, in the US, by any contact with the actual upper class), the middle class is so much larger, so any society that wants to excel in R&D is going to treat it well. Both the USSR and the West deliberately engineered middle classes that they protected from the failures of their systems.

Tech was "cool" because our society gave a certain set of highly talented people R&D jobs in which they could pretty much work on whatever they wanted. You weren't guaranteed to get rich working for DARPA, but you'd have a solid middle-class lifestyle and lifetime financial security, and basically have free rein in your choice of projects. So, there was a lot of innovation, because people could work on things that might not drive revenue in the next quarter.

Of course, we "won" the Cold War in late 1991 and the Soviet Union is no more. The elites of the West no longer need a huge middle class. In the EU, there has been some political resistance against dismantling it; in the US, there was almost none. We had a few good years when we were able to coast, but after 9/11--and certainly after 2008--it was clear that the same people from the First Gilded Age were back in charge. And now tent cities and mass preventable death by infectious disease and even slavery (prison labor) are fully back. Yay capitalism?

So, these days, tech is no longer about expanding human capability; it's about enriching the already rich (and careerist middle managers). Almost all of the money in technology is made in these seven things:

1. Unemploying people (evergreen, alas). 2. Spying on people to unemploy them, or to squeeze more out of workers (also evergreen). 3. Dressing up old rent-seeking businesses as "tech companies", thereby allowing them to run at a loss for ten years (dumping) while they try to outlive existing players. 4. Speculative nonsense investments like badly-drawn pictures of butts. 5. Usury (evergreen) and myriad technologies and tools necessary to support an economy that runs on it. 6. Killing people for the benefit of various private entities (a nation's supposed "economic interests"). 7. Wanton exploitation of tech nostalgia, often through mediocre accomplishments. In the late 1960s, we sent people to the Moon. In 2021, a CEO whose workers pee in bottles spends millions (billions?) to take a piss 70 miles over our heads, and we treat that as a real accomplishment because it's "private spaceflight". SMFH.

These are all shitty, not at all cool, and the culture follows. Consequently, we flooded by the refuse of other industries--the people who fail in private equity or aren't smart enough to become traders all go West and boss nerds around, earning $500k (or more) in jobs that involve teabagging H1-Bs and teenagers with their Agile Scrums.

If we want tech to be better, we have to take back our industry. This will be hard, and we will face opposition--possibly violent opposition, seeing as people are physically harassed and blacklisted even now on the suspicion of union sympathies.

> Good indie games like Super meat boy & Hollow Knight take more human resources than AAA-gamechanger Doom did

I just read "Masters of Doom", and this struck me as wrong. People tend to only remember Carmack and Romero, but Doom had a team about as big as Super Mario World, another AAA-gamechanger. So I looked it up.

15 people worked on the OG DOS version of Doom. Many more of course when you start including developers and producers on its ports and localizations.

The crediting of Super Meat Boy is more complex. If you exclude the guest artists who did one-off pieces, then the original Windows version comes in at 7 people. This balloons to 48 when you include the guest art, XBox port staff, and localization staff.

All numbers from MobyGames.

The internet took decades to evolve and was heavily funded early on by government. It only became low hanging fruit once it achieved a high level of maturity -- largely until the WWW had a graphical browser.

I see this opinion everywhere: “Tech and tech culture is awful now.”

It’s not, it has the same problems that it did before, possibly fewer because effort has been put into acknowledging and correcting them.

Things today are objectively better than what came before. The difference is PR. It’s no longer “cool” to report on technology. It’s cool for people with little to no background in technology to trash technology for the amusement of other, similarly uninitiated, people.

The current anti-tech media trend started with the show Silicon Valley [0]. It exposed some tech non-sense to non-tech people and gave them effective tools to make fun of the nerds they didn’t like anyway. Instead of generating empathy or sympathy for the good people stuck in or trying to change those systems, it made it ok to paint every person working in tech with the same brush you’d reserve for its worst actors.

It’s like Blockchain and NFTs. All the sudden people started getting up riled up about them. But, when you ask them how they feel about the dark implications of HTTP they don’t have much of an opinion. An opinion hasn’t been given to them. You can usually swap out Blockchain for HTTP and their arguments would still make perfects sense.. But then, who’d listen?

It’s hard to become a competent workaday programmer. The people who know how to program are able to generate and accumulate wealth at a rate unattainable by most non-programmers. With the fabric of our society wearing thinner and thinner the gulf between an engineer at DoorDash and a delivery person contracted by DoorDash is widening. There’s something inherently unfair about what’s happening today. We can all feel it. But, the answer isn’t to burn everything down and start over with a NEW ANTI-CAPITALIST UTOPIA. It’s to correct course.

I’ve worked with anti-capitalist people in media. The way they treat each other is shocking, only slightly better than the way they treat everyone else. Instead of seeing laws, corporations, and technology, as how people interact and engage with one another, they see evils that they refuse to master. Instead of empowering themselves by understanding the systems of the world and making them accessible to others, they’ve decided that it’s easier, and more profitable in the short-term, to rail against these inherent evils and their practitioners. They’ve concluded that the system is corrupt, the board needs to be flipped, and anything short of that is heresy.

Hating on tech and tech people is something that the cool kids do now. I’d wager that you feel the way you do in part because you’re being bombarded with messaging about the evils of technology as stand-ins for almost every problem the world is facing. Sometimes the criticism is nuanced and thoughtful. It’s usually not.

[0]: Which is fantastic.