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Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

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Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#71

Post by advsavsdvav »

shpx wrote: post #37
bastardoperator wrote: post #12

We 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.

I know its HN and bashing big tech/ad-tech is what almost everyone agree on here, but come on, is it really the same as tobacco.

Even if we focus only on big ad-tech, many of the ad-based companies provide very useful products. That's why their business models work. Think google - maps alone is one incredible product or think Meta, Whatsapp has helped me save thousands of $ I would have otherwise spent on international calling, and I am so much closer and engaged to family and friends because of it, Martketplace has helped me buy/sell lots of stuff and saved me lot of money too. And the list goes on.

I do not disagree there are problems with these companies and products but its just simply incorrect to equate it to tobacco. There are tons of products that these companies make that are actually very productive and useful.

Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#72

Post by bugglebeetle »

pjscott wrote: post #47
bugglebeetle wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I’m sure the poor people in villages watching the world becoming ever more desperate, unequal, and fundamentally unstable on their smartphones share in your notion of prosperity. That’s why they’re drowning en masse in the Mediterranean, dying of exposure on the US border, or being imprisoned and tortured in any number of migrant detention facilities around the world. Because they’re so “prosperous” now.

Poverty rates worldwide have been going downward at a decent pace since the late 1800s, and really started plummeting faster between the mid-1990s and today. Here are some cheery graphs: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief That doesn't mean that everyone is rich, but it is actually a really big deal . Next time you're tempted to write a phrase like "watching the world becoming ever more desperate" whe…

My point is exactly this misguided view of the world, that the global north can live lives of insane decadence, built on its history and continued plundering of the global south, while expecting them to find a reduction in extreme poverty as ameliorative. Your comment only reminds me that liberals are people who believe that luxury can exist without the suffering of others.

There is no path in the current Capitalist world order that will allow for a rise in the global south to current, western levels of development. The resulting increase in labor and resource costs would face immediate armed confrontation from the global north, as already happened with the myriad US-backed military coups during the past century.

Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#73

Post by tech_ken »

shpx wrote: post #37
bastardoperator wrote: post #12

We 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.

I'm not sure if this logic really holds up. Lot's of things "waste time". By this definition both television (before scrolling people would easily spend 2+ hours watching "the boob tube") and traffic (many people drive 45+ minutes each way to and from work, which is time fully "wasted") are both equivalent to smoking.

Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#74

Post by tech_ken »

Many industries have massive negative externalities and a stranglehold on regulation through lobbying, loose campaign finance laws, and regulatory capture. I get that scrolling can become compulsive for some people, but I think comparing it to Big Tobacco or even like the firearms industry kind of overstates the case. Magazines and print media clearly led to high prevalence of eating disorders and other behavioral health problems in the pre-internet era, did the publishing industry ever have it's "Big Tobacco moment"? What about the auto industry, which has absolutely trashed the air quality in our cities and towns? The meat industry is a horrorshow of environmental destruction, negative health effects, and labor abus, where are it's big showy hearings and investigative committees? Instead we shower it with government support in the form of grain subsidies.

Ad-tech is sleazy, and no doubt needs to be reined in, but the problem is that private corporations in general need to be better held accountable, not "Big Tech" specifically.

Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#75

Post by scarface_74 »

CPLX wrote: post #57
paxys wrote: post #32

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 most important word in the phrase is “big” not “tech”. The problem with these firms is they have too much concentrated power, which they obtained through anti-competitive practices that are now cemented into the business model. This is bad for society and it’s imperative on society to break up these entities and the power they wield as it’s incompatible with a democratic society.

So how do you propose to break them up.

And which one has a “monopoly” to the point you can’t choose an alternative?

People are using their own free will to use their products

Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#76

Post by squirtlebonflow »

SoftTalker wrote: post #62
pyrale wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Mankind will endure. Maybe in fewer numbers than today, but it's hard to imagine anything that would completely wipe out the human species worldwide, even if things collapse back to hunter-gatherer survival.

That's not... a good thing. Who cares about "the preservation of the species". If 7 billion people die and the remaining survivors are happier than ever, that's a huge loss IMO.

Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#77

Post by ocdtrekkie »

pjscott wrote: post #55
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #6

Been saying this for years, the only reason these companies' execs aren't in prison is because they grease all the right palms, and provide enough "studies" those greased palms can use to plausibly justify their behavior.

In prison on what charges? In the US it's illegal to imprison someone based purely on vibes, and you can't make things crimes retroactively. (See Article I, Section 9 of the constitution; in particular the parts concerning habeas corpus , bills of attainder, and ex post facto laws.)

Like... a lot of charges. Fraud, sexual assault... these are already crimes. I could try to write a novel here to go into it on all the different illegal things every tech exec has done and gotten away with, but if you were under the impression we'd need to make new laws from them to have committed crimes, we're so far apart from each other's understanding that it's not really worth going too deep into.

But suffice to say, outright fraud about the ad business is pretty core to most of Google and Facebook's revenue, and the entire original C-suite of Google has at least some sort of sexual harassment or abuse story out there they never got held accountable for.

The biggest problem is not making crimes, it's that our enforcement of our own laws involving executive misconduct has continued for so long, that the statute of limitations would be the biggest problem prosecuting a lot of people today.

Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#79

Post by bagacrap »

CPLX wrote: post #57
paxys wrote: post #32

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 most important word in the phrase is “big” not “tech”. The problem with these firms is they have too much concentrated power, which they obtained through anti-competitive practices that are now cemented into the business model. This is bad for society and it’s imperative on society to break up these entities and the power they wield as it’s incompatible with a democratic society.

Then why not compare to big oil, big pharma, etc? The point is that both Big Tobacco and Meta sell dopamine addictions.

Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#80

Post by scarface_74 »

advsavsdvav wrote: post #71
shpx wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know its HN and bashing big tech/ad-tech is what almost everyone agree on here, but come on, is it really the same as tobacco. Even if we focus only on big ad-tech, many of the ad-based companies provide very useful products. That's why their business models work. Think google - maps alone is one incredible product or think Meta, Whatsapp has helped me save thousands of $ I would have otherwise spent on internation…

> I know its HN and bashing big tech/ad-tech is what almost everyone agree on here,

Which is ironic since many of them (us) make their living either working at BigTech, or working at a startup hoping to get acquired by BigTech

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