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The techlash that never happened

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Re: The techlash that never happened

#11

Post by jakelazaroff »

mnkv wrote: post #8

Of all the absolute horseshit in the article, the most obviously wrong is saying that "tech doesn't play both sides of the political aisle". So obviously wrong if you look at any single company. Just recently, we saw how FTX was lobbying hard for both sides. And there absolutely has been a backlash against tech. Ask any Facebook employee how people react when they say where they work.

Oh, for sure. Peter Thiel was an advisor to Donald Trump! Maciej Cegłowski (the person who operates Pinboard) has done a bunch of threads on Twitter cataloging the extensive donations of big tech companies to politicians on both sides of the aisle: https://twitter.com/search?q=donation%20from%3Apinboard

I also love the tacit admission that Clarence Thomas is acting as a partisan, rather than an unbiased member of an ostensibly apolitical institution.

Re: The techlash that never happened

#12

Post by CPLX »

blululu wrote: post #10
mnkv wrote: post #8

Of all the absolute horseshit in the article, the most obviously wrong is saying that "tech doesn't play both sides of the political aisle". So obviously wrong if you look at any single company. Just recently, we saw how FTX was lobbying hard for both sides. And there absolutely has been a backlash against tech. Ask any Facebook employee how people react when they say where they work.

What? Internet companies are up there with trade unions and Hollywood in donating to the left: https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/most-partisan... Facebook is an exception. They really let their brand collapse on multiple levels. Looking at the rest of FAANG (MAGMA? whatever) the situation is pretty different. Nobody at Microsoft is ashamed to tell their families that they make dashboards to help visualiz…

Depends on what you call the left. If you mean the modern Democratic Party then sure.

If you mean the division of contemporary politics that is associated with advocacy for the rights of workers and diminished power for the managerial and capital owning classes then they most certainly do not do that at all.

Re: The techlash that never happened

#13

Post by xwdv »

mnkv wrote: post #8

Of all the absolute horseshit in the article, the most obviously wrong is saying that "tech doesn't play both sides of the political aisle". So obviously wrong if you look at any single company. Just recently, we saw how FTX was lobbying hard for both sides. And there absolutely has been a backlash against tech. Ask any Facebook employee how people react when they say where they work.

Facebook is like Jupiter, absorbing the heavy hits so us smaller players can operate unscathed.

Re: The techlash that never happened

#14

Post by chrisco255 »

mnkv wrote: post #8

Of all the absolute horseshit in the article, the most obviously wrong is saying that "tech doesn't play both sides of the political aisle". So obviously wrong if you look at any single company. Just recently, we saw how FTX was lobbying hard for both sides. And there absolutely has been a backlash against tech. Ask any Facebook employee how people react when they say where they work.

Silicon Valley is 15% Republican and 53% Democrat [1]. Tech is a highly skewed industry. 98% of Netflix employees donated to Democrats in 2020, 77% of Amazon employees. Overall 84% of political donations in major tech companies goes to Democrats [2].

https://siliconvalleyindicators.org/data/governance/civic-en...

https://www.newsweek.com/big-tech-employees-donate-overwhelm...

Re: The techlash that never happened

#16

Post by owlbite »

chrisco255 wrote: post #14
mnkv wrote: post #8

Of all the absolute horseshit in the article, the most obviously wrong is saying that "tech doesn't play both sides of the political aisle". So obviously wrong if you look at any single company. Just recently, we saw how FTX was lobbying hard for both sides. And there absolutely has been a backlash against tech. Ask any Facebook employee how people react when they say where they work.

Silicon Valley is 15% Republican and 53% Democrat [1]. Tech is a highly skewed industry. 98% of Netflix employees donated to Democrats in 2020, 77% of Amazon employees. Overall 84% of political donations in major tech companies goes to Democrats [2]. https://siliconvalleyindicators.org/data/governance/civic-en... https://www.newsweek.com/big-tech-employees-donate-overwhelm...

That doesn't stop them spending in such a way that they achieve their aims regardless of which color of tie is more dominant in the corridors of power.

Re: The techlash that never happened

#17

Post by the_cat_kittles »

chrisco255 wrote: post #14
mnkv wrote: post #8

Of all the absolute horseshit in the article, the most obviously wrong is saying that "tech doesn't play both sides of the political aisle". So obviously wrong if you look at any single company. Just recently, we saw how FTX was lobbying hard for both sides. And there absolutely has been a backlash against tech. Ask any Facebook employee how people react when they say where they work.

Silicon Valley is 15% Republican and 53% Democrat [1]. Tech is a highly skewed industry. 98% of Netflix employees donated to Democrats in 2020, 77% of Amazon employees. Overall 84% of political donations in major tech companies goes to Democrats [2]. https://siliconvalleyindicators.org/data/governance/civic-en... https://www.newsweek.com/big-tech-employees-donate-overwhelm...

supporting democratic candidates while working for companies that exacerbate the problems they supposed want to fix makes it hard for me to call someone a democrat unambiguously

Re: The techlash that never happened

#18

Post by novok »

majormajor wrote: post #3

The "media sentiment change happened because Facebook ad revenue surpassed newspaper advertising revenue" makes a cute soundbite and there's some correlation graphs, but the details presented here are pretty weak. E.g. the NYT started being negative towards facebook because of "filter bubbles" undercutting them in a conspiratorial way instead of a "that sounds bad" way - HN is mostly negative on filter bubbles too. S…

If you dig in more into the techlash, you also see a lot of... biased behavior on the NYT. Other newspapers also have this demonstrated behavior too, but the NYT is the most well researched.

It's not just FB article sentiment analysis, it's everything they've written. If you look at all sentiment & word usage of all articles you'll notice sudden shifts . The NYT also has a narrative department that explicitly crafts all articles towards a target narrative for example and rejects articles or phrases that doesn't go towards the current target narrative. And because people that work in these industries do not want to be informally blacklisted explaining this, in an industry where it's hard to get work, there isn't much in terms of good investigative journalism into the behavior of media itself, so it has to come from outsiders often. If you can get an NYT journalist drunk and talk about the right things, your eyes will start getting realllllllyyyy wide.

The NYT explicitly decided to generate the techlash as their current narrative, it wasn't an emergent behavior because of events in the world.

Re: The techlash that never happened

#19

Post by [deleted] »

CPLX wrote: post #12
blululu wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Internet companies are up there with trade unions and Hollywood in donating to the left: https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/most-partisan... Facebook is an exception. They really let their brand collapse on multiple levels. Looking at the rest of FAANG (MAGMA? whatever) the situation is pretty different. Nobody at Microsoft is ashamed to tell their families that they make dashboards to help visualiz…

Depends on what you call the left. If you mean the modern Democratic Party then sure. If you mean the division of contemporary politics that is associated with advocacy for the rights of workers and diminished power for the managerial and capital owning classes then they most certainly do not do that at all .

[deleted]

Re: The techlash that never happened

#20

Post by csallen »

ojbyrne wrote: post #7

The top graph (Gallup 2017 Business & Industry Ranking Net Positive Scores) is 6 years old. 2022 results can be found here: https://news.gallup.com/poll/12748/business-industry-sector-... Computer Industry is now 3rd and the Net Positive has gone from 67 to 35. Internet Industry has gone from 5th to the bottom half of the list and the Net Positive has gone from 41 to -2. Perhaps the Techlash was just a little late.

I don't disagree with the trend you're point out, but it also has to be put in perspective:

1. That chart lists 25 industries, and "computer industry" still ranks #3 in terms of how positive people feel about it. It's ahead of almost everything. "Internet industry" is right in the middle of the pack. So tech is scoring somewhere between average and wayyy-better-than-average. Doesn't sound like much of a techlash.

2. Net positive sentiment has dropped in pretty much every sector. The most popular industry, the restaurant industry, saw a drop from 65% to 45% net positive. The second most popular industry, agriculture, saw a drop from 58% to 43%. In 2017 there were only 4 industries with net negative scores, but in 2022 there were 12, a 3x increase. So a big part of tech's apparent decline in popularity is really just a universal decline.

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