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The techlash that never happened

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Re: The techlash that never happened

#21

Post by c22 »

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...

If you look at the chart over time it looks like 'no party preference' is eating the republican side of the graph. It looks like the republican party is fracturing, which is great because we need more than two political parties. I wish the other side would break up too.

Re: The techlash that never happened

#22

Post by repsilat »

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.

> just a little late

It fits with the article's explanation really. The media hate tech, propagandize against it, and they eventually win people over.

Re: The techlash that never happened

#23

Post by anonymouskimmer »

csallen wrote: post #20
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.…

For the 2017 results I think it was disingenuous to ignore the "telephone industry" ranking when talking about "tech" in general. The "telephone industry" did improve its relative placement in the 2022 results.

I'm also uncertain as to how much of "television and radio industry" should be considered tech, or not.

Re: The techlash that never happened

#24

Post by mxkopy »

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 .

There are dozens of us!

Re: The techlash that never happened

#25

Post by Phiwise_ »

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.

>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.

Wider data seems to suggest it's not that simple: https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

>And there absolutely has been a backlash against tech. Ask any Facebook employee how people react when they say where they work.

I don't know firsthand, but the impression I've gotten, especially more recently, from silicon valley is that Facebook and Zuckerberg is the sacrificial goat the rest of the industry hopes to lay their sins on and drive into the desert. How much of the hatred for facebook employees is perpetuated, or at least was seeded, by tech itself rather than the general population? Do Uber employees get the same reaction? More politically apples-to-apples, do Google, or specifically Youtube, employees? If not, could it be because they use Facebook to distract from their own actions the rest of America wouldn't approve of if they were more in the media spotlight, and didn't have the scapegoat to point to?

Re: The techlash that never happened

#26

Post by anonymouskimmer »

c22 wrote: post #21
chrisco255 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

If you look at the chart over time it looks like 'no party preference' is eating the republican side of the graph. It looks like the republican party is fracturing, which is great because we need more than two political parties. I wish the other side would break up too.

> I wish the other side would break up too.

At least in recent years independents (in Congress) have caucused with Democrats, but not Republicans. This is evidence that the Dems are slightly broken up already.

To get more fine-grained, each party has sub-divisions (e.g. "Freedom Caucus" in the Republican party). The real problem is that these sub-divisions basically don't cross over to allying with the other party on particular issues. If they ever do do that, and do it consistently (not as one-off decisions from individual representatives) then the US will effectively have a more than two party system.

But even if that happens, the actual people getting elected will almost always only have an R or a D after their name. First past the post, as it is done in the US, can't really sustain more than two competitive parties.

Re: The techlash that never happened

#27

Post by q7xvh97o2pDhNrh »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #23
csallen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

For the 2017 results I think it was disingenuous to ignore the "telephone industry" ranking when talking about "tech" in general. The "telephone industry" did improve its relative placement in the 2022 results. I'm also uncertain as to how much of "television and radio industry" should be considered tech, or not.

> I'm also uncertain as to how much of "television and radio industry" should be considered tech, or not.

That's the thing. They're all tech industries, at this point.

Re: The techlash that never happened

#28

Post by comeonbro »

rcpt wrote: post #15

wrt to the NYT specifically, it was an intentional top down decision https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192 Context: https://web.archive.org/web/20221104205605/https://twitter.c...

I'm surprised that the article didn't mention this, given the company the author apparently keeps I would have thought he'd have been among the criminally few people who witnessed and is aware of it, and it's both narratively aligned and the single most important piece of background information.

Re: The techlash that never happened

#29

Post by anonymouskimmer »

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #27
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the 2017 results I think it was disingenuous to ignore the "telephone industry" ranking when talking about "tech" in general. The "telephone industry" did improve its relative placement in the 2022 results. I'm also uncertain as to how much of "television and radio industry" should be considered tech, or not.

> I'm also uncertain as to how much of "television and radio industry" should be considered tech, or not. That's the thing. They're all tech industries, at this point.

As an easy rule of thumb I kind of draw the line for when computer and information technology is an enabler of the industry or just a facilitator. For telephones we've passed the point for the majority of the population. For radio I don't know if it has yet reached that point. And for television I just don't know, but from the complaints about smart TVs we may have.

Re: The techlash that never happened

#30

Post by comex »

novok wrote: post #18
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…

> 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.

Citation needed.

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