Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

bigtechwiki.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 127 posts

Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#11

Post by isodev »

danzer420 wrote: post #8

can we not conflate facebook.com and twitter with big tech? big tech is driving many of the technological advancements that have brought a new era of economic prosperity and growth to the world. hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs, tools for small businesses, a wealth of high quality information at our fingertips, the likes of which was one generation ago unimaginable. tech is like humanity's one hope.

There is also Reddit, Google… I mean, do we really need to list all the companies that need perpetual increase of “engagement” to power their business model?

Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#16

Post by teej »

Andrex wrote: post #13
bastardoperator wrote: post #12

We can draw parallels, but you've never developed lung cancer doom scrolling twitter.

Sharply increasing suicide rates among teens due to social media isn't something to just shrug off, either.

Something also not caused by doom scrolling twitter.

Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#17

Post by troupo »

danzer420 wrote: post #8

can we not conflate facebook.com and twitter with big tech? big tech is driving many of the technological advancements that have brought a new era of economic prosperity and growth to the world. hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs, tools for small businesses, a wealth of high quality information at our fingertips, the likes of which was one generation ago unimaginable. tech is like humanity's one hope.

> big tech is driving many of the technological advancements that have brought a new era of economic prosperity and growth to the world.

Companies that actually do that are rarely big tech. And Big Tech as term colloquially refers to Facebook, Google etc.

Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#19

Post by politelemon »

danzer420 wrote: post #8

can we not conflate facebook.com and twitter with big tech? big tech is driving many of the technological advancements that have brought a new era of economic prosperity and growth to the world. hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs, tools for small businesses, a wealth of high quality information at our fingertips, the likes of which was one generation ago unimaginable. tech is like humanity's one hope.

Prosperity does not equate to betterment of humanity. The prosperity of concentrated to a small section of the population, at the expense of the majority.

It is nowhere near the deliverer of hope you're making it out to be, it's an enabler of great negative paradigm shifts that is slowly starting to be recognised. Social media is starting to be recognised as a harm on society but slowly... It'll probably take a few decades for wide retrospective agreement (in other words when it's too late)

Post reply on HN