91–100 of 127 posts
I think a better comparison would be to big oil, steel and manufacturing in the early 1900s. Big tech has its problems but provides significant tangible benefits to people and the world. Tobacco is purely a negative, not innovative, and relies on the chemical addictive properties of a plant to offer a needless service.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Court order, legislation.
> And which one has a “monopoly” to the point you can’t choose an alternative?
Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, for starters.
By the way that’s not the definition of a monopoly.
> People are using their own free will to use their products
From an artificially constrained set of options. Anti competitive behavior has clear definable negative outcomes, you can feign confusion if you want but it’s not confusing.
Or, if it’s easier for you, you can just understand that organizations that wield massive amounts of power over the daily lives of ordinary citizens must be governed and restrained by democratic process in order for society to function.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
> So how do you propose to break them up. Court order, legislation. > And which one has a “monopoly” to the point you can’t choose an alternative? Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, for starters. By the way that’s not the definition of a monopoly. > People are using their own free will to use their products From an artificially constrained set of options. Anti competitive behavior has clear definable negative outcomes,…
That’s not what I meant. What would a break up for them look like? For instance AT&T was broken up into the baby bells.
> From an artificially constrained set of options
There is no other option for phones? Social media? Computers? Online commerce? And how is it “artificial”?
> Or, if it’s easier for you, you can just understand that organizations that wield massive amounts of power over the daily lives of ordinary citizens
So what is this “power”? How are they forcing you to do anything you don’t want to do?
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…
Thank you. I've always been bothered by this lack of seperation. 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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My personal test for this is: what percentage of the company's total value is comprised of the intellectual property their software source code holds. The higher the percentage the more of a "tech" company you are - the lower the more "traditional" you are. No company will ever be 100% - all companies have other assets that are worth money and even a company that sells software as its main product might have lots of…
Isn't that a test for a software company? Texas Instruments' value is mostly in their integrated circuits IP (as well as manufacturing prowess, process knowledge, and a little bit of software). They're still solidly a "tech" company in my books.
For example, imagine a company with very little proprietary code because they focus entirely on renting out their CPU/GPU/disk capacity, for supercomputing, databases, render-farms, cloud backup, etc. I'd still call that a "tech company."
It's also not clear how this "intellectual property of the source code" angle would accommodate the network-effects or value of a subscriber-base... Well, I suppose you could argue that such an asset doesn't require high-tech means, it could all be snail-mail.
I'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".
The unhealthy food industry also lobbies against regulation (such as sugar or snack taxes, or banning unhealthy foods in schools), and blames the consumers of their products. I wouldn't be surprised if they funded biased scientific studies as well. Meanwhile sugar subsidies cost US taxpayers billions of dollars.
Also consider the "low-fat" movement that blamed fat for obesity, disease, and death while ignoring soda and highly processed foods loaded with sugar, simple carbs, sodium, and additives.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of the companies you mentioned have non trivial investments in ads. I recently was surprised to find how big of an ad business Adobe has for example. Not sure that these companies would cease to exist if it weren’t for advertising but ads do influence these companies’ products.
Everyone has an investment in ads. Think news media, movies, TV, fashion, your local grocery store, a bus with a billboard on its side. That's just how the world runs. If you want to hold it against them then you are basically ranting against all of capitalism rather than anything specific to "big tech".
When you understand that, you know that is not how the world runs and is actually very specific to big tech as they pioneered this hyper specific shift. You do not have access to everyone's information who sees your billboard. You do however have access to exactly how many people in a certain area during a certain time with the income between 50-100k who are older men who enjoy football, has seen your digital ad. Hopefully that illustrates the difference well enough.
To calibrate, imagine if government and all public sector entities would include in all their commumications with citizens prominent mention of specific tobacco products and brands and actually inviting people to use them.
This incredible and abnormal capture of society is now the new normal. Check any public institution site and it explicitly advertises big tech services using links and invites people to engage using these specific, private, for-profit platforms. Picking winners, explicitly endorsing platforms that have turned users into products, track and model any and all behavior online etc.
People just dont realize how degenerate and dangerous our predicament. The fact that there are no reflexes to violently expose and terminate this collusion means there is basically no meaningful democratic muscle left.
Big tech is the tombstone of democratic society. 10x worse than big tobacco. Nobody will force you to smoke but increasingly it is impossible to be a normal member of society without conceding our agency to nefarious digital conglomerates.
I think a better comparison would be to big oil, steel and manufacturing in the early 1900s. Big tech has its problems but provides significant tangible benefits to people and the world. Tobacco is purely a negative, not innovative, and relies on the chemical addictive properties of a plant to offer a needless service.