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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.
You and the author are both lumping all of Big Tech in together with Big Attention-Exploitation. The latter is the subset to which people’s ire should be directed.
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.
> tech is like humanity's one hope. It's funny, because despite constant warfare, plagues, nasty ideologies, etc. the last time at which mankind was basically guaranteed to endure was before the industrial use of tech. Since then we've had world wars, the atomic bomb and its scare, global warming, accelerated biodiversity collapse, and it seems we can't pass a new day without discovering a new things which we rely on…
I "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.
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.
> tech is like humanity's one hope. It's funny, because despite constant warfare, plagues, nasty ideologies, etc. the last time at which mankind was basically guaranteed to endure was before the industrial use of tech. Since then we've had world wars, the atomic bomb and its scare, global warming, accelerated biodiversity collapse, and it seems we can't pass a new day without discovering a new things which we rely on…
Apple 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…
Apple 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…
Apple 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…
The 'dirty' parts of tech: * media * social media * PII repackaging and unethical sourcing * targeted ads
Neutral or clean parts: * e-commerce * business automation * technical and educational information
Conflating a normal stimuli with something that's actually addictive is more dangerous than the thing it intends to stop because it justifies the use of force in a situation where there's no force used. Not even implicitly like with cigarettes being addictive. If you look at the DSM5 you'll see the only behavioral addiction disorder is "gambling disorder" and that's grandfathered in.
These modern memes about how screens are addictive being taken seriously are themselves the danger. Just like with "porn addiction" or "curing homosexuality" the people pushing it in serious contexts are generally ones running for-profit private "detox" centers or expensive "treatments".
I'm no fan of "big tech" but I can easily chose not to use it. And if I have to use it for work, it in no way forces me to use it at home. Big tech is bad but this line of argument is nearly as bad.