There are similarities, just exchange lung cancer with suicides among teens. Big Tech must take its responsibility more seriously and not pretend it's not their fault.
Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
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Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
#32Apple sells devices and consumer services. Microsoft sells an OS and Office suite to businesses. Amazon is a retail marketplace and a cloud operator. Nvidia sells graphics cards. Adobe sells graphics software. Netflix makes movies and TV. Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments all design chipsets. Salesforce sells CRM. Oracle, IBM, Cisco and the like all sell various business services.
Go down the list of big tech companies and you'll find tens of trillions of dollars of valuation – more than most other industries put together – having nothing to do with social media or advertising. Even if you remove Meta (which the article is about) from existence, "big tech" would largely remain the same.
So yes, all the concerns raised in the article are valid, but equating Meta/Facebook with the entirety of tech is idiotic. Such companies make up a very tiny slice of what the technology sector is about, and they hardly wield the amount of political influence that is suggested.
Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
#33I "Big Tech" incorrectly categorizes the problem. The problem is social media products that monetize attention.
Meta, Twitter and other companies that build deep social media products are in this group.
Netflix is not. Microsoft is not. Google is not.
I don't like that just because you're a large tech company you're immediately demonized. This is demonizing success in this field rather than "wrong" doing.
Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
#34Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
#35I'm more concerned about Big Food as the new Big Tabacco. You don't get cancer consuming tech products as much as you get from Big "food".
I'm seeing religion that way. It's hard to go to dinner without the prayer drifting over from other tables, and even in LA most restaurants don't have no prayer zones yet. We have known for years that it's not good for anyone, but they have tough lobbyists, so getting rid of the problem just seems impossible. We all accept somehow that sports figures and celebrities endorse the product - they're adults. We accept tha…
I legitimately can't tell if this is satire or not.
> [E]ven in LA most restaurants don't have no prayer zones yet
No municipality in a region with a bill of rights providing freedom of religion is going to create no prayer zones.
> It's hard to go to dinner without the prayer drifting over from other tables
This makes me think this is satire...
Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
#36https://publicknowledge.org/is-this-really-big-techs-big-tob...
tldr; The testimony of one of the Facebook "whistleblowers" drew the analogy to Big Tobacco from Sen. Blumenthal back in 2021.^1 But in 1995 Congress took action after Wigand^2 testified. None of Big Tech's leakers so far have triggered action by Congress. Even more, in the 1990's there was at least 10 years of litigation before there was legislative action. Suing Big tech is more problematic. IMO, it's mainly because they can continue to hide behind Section 230. Was 230 was intended to protect corporations with trillion dollar market caps. Big Tobacco had nothing like Section 230.
1. Even earlier Salesforce guy was comparing Big Tech to cigarettes.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/14/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-... https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-is-the-new-cigare...
Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
#37We can draw parallels, but you've never developed lung cancer doom scrolling twitter.
If being a smoker decreases your life expectancy by 10 years and you live 80 years, then if you're wasting 1/8 of your day on screens (2 hours/day if you don't count sleeping 8 hours) then it's sort of like smoking, if we equate wasting your life with not living at all.
Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
#38Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
#39can 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 d…
Prosperity gives access to more people. "Betterment of humanity" sounds like "human growth but by my own standards".
Prosperity is what's made it possible for anyone to survive and have varying levels of access to thriving. Humanity is moving forward and we're figuring things out.
Pointing at a big category of businesses to demonize them is not "betterment of humanity".
Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
#40Apple sells devices and consumer services. Microsoft sells an OS and Office suite to businesses. Amazon is a retail marketplace and a cloud operator. Nvidia sells graphics cards. Adobe sells graphics software. Netflix makes movies and TV. Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments all design chipsets. Salesforce sells CRM. Oracle, IBM, Cisco and the like all sell various business services. Go down the list of big tec…
That ship has sailed. “Tech” is simply a positioning or branding term.
Meta and Amazon are businesses that depend on developing technology (so are true tech companies as much as NVIDIA or Apple) but nowadays “tech” merely means at best “online”. Most so-called “tech” companies don’t actually develop any technology at all, often being less technical than a non-“tech” company like, say, State Farm.
The term has become so denatured that a new term, “deep tech” has been coined to mean what “technology company” used to mean.