An article with this title needs only three words in the body: Too much money.
How the Tech World Turned Evil
31–40 of 42 posts
Re: How the Tech World Turned Evil
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am sure you have read this same article over and over again in many different forms, I certainly have. Is it possible that we read it so often because it's obvious and undeniable? In fairness, I do agree with your assessment that the moralizing of figures like Musk and Zuckerberg has gotten old. But it's old because we've been criticizing them for years and nobody responds. Elon and Mark are net-negative fraudste…
I'm not interested in defending the trend as much as I am in understanding it, which the article promises but doesn't deliver. To begin to understand this, you have to examine the actions of the heroes as critically as the villains as defined in this piece. The article lays out clearly the negative desires of the villains, and the positive desires of the heroes, but do the heroes have any negative aspects? Does the E…
> To begin to understand this, you have to examine the actions of the heroes as critically as the villains as defined in this piece.
I disagree.
To properly understand this, you need to focus not on the specific people who happen to have ended up on top of it, but the systems that enabled them to get there.
And to (probably over-)simplify it for the sake of a short post, I believe the root cause is in Ronald Reagan's deregulation and gutting of antitrust. With a robust antitrust regime through the '80s and '90s, we would not have had the kind of tech behemoths we did then, leading to the unstoppable tech juggernauts of today.
Re: How the Tech World Turned Evil
#33> Once upon a time, they were counterculture idealists bringing power to the people. Today they’re greedy monopolists who’d sooner destroy our democracy than be reined in by government in any way—and they have to be stopped.
What changed? The people in question remain the same. Apparently those people are no longer paying their tithe to the Big Guy, and so the narrative winds have shifted, AFAICT.
Re: How the Tech World Turned Evil
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not as much as the article (and especially headline) suggest. It most certainly hasn't been frozen in time but I'd wager there are more people trying to use tech to make the world a better place now than ever before (though there has been a massive influx of people who make almost no attempt).
In my experience tech changed the way it is displayed in this article. Tech products really degraded in the past year. YouTube is now unwatchable because of ads every 4-5 minutes, google search is similarly un-usable (I switched to Bing and it is ok for now, but if it gets worse I already know its replacement). I used to love using Excel-it is now unusable as well (I switched to libreOffice on my work computer where…
I haven't used any of the things you mentioned (except for an iPad) for a decade or so, but I can assure you they were all awful then compared to my experience years earlier with them.
Re: How the Tech World Turned Evil
#35The irony of tech is that reducing friction (such as the Internet making it easy to go to one provider or another) also makes it easy to go straight to the “best”. By being consistently 0.1% better in the early days, many of these companies earned themselves an unassailable lead. Why go to the little guy when the big guy is big and safe and familiar (yes we at HN don’t operate this way; we aren’t normies and are a mi…
> When there’s no growth to be had by being nice, but you’re still being told to grow.. well, yeah. Don't be evil sets a limit to growth.
In such case, those who respect that limit will not grow, those who don't respect the limit will grow.
Re: How the Tech World Turned Evil
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not as much as the article (and especially headline) suggest. It most certainly hasn't been frozen in time but I'd wager there are more people trying to use tech to make the world a better place now than ever before (though there has been a massive influx of people who make almost no attempt).
In my experience tech changed the way it is displayed in this article. Tech products really degraded in the past year. YouTube is now unwatchable because of ads every 4-5 minutes, google search is similarly un-usable (I switched to Bing and it is ok for now, but if it gets worse I already know its replacement). I used to love using Excel-it is now unusable as well (I switched to libreOffice on my work computer where…
Haha sounds like you're just getting old ;)
I think we are seeing a crop of the old companies going through the Large Corporation Lifecycles. They're well past founder-run stage, and it's a hard transition. If profitability declines, they spiral fast when they are traded as Growth companies- even their talent pool requires stocks going up otherwise how many good, smart people stick around when they're getting an effective demotion quarter after quarter, year after year. I look at companies like GE and Sears and see how hard it is to survive one or two "generations" of leadership change.
I still think these megacorps you reference aren't going full on Evil, but are just struggling to keep momentum (and trying everything they can to keep it). Youtube allows anyone to upload the most data and compute media forms in massive quantities for FREE. That's insane to me. On top of that, there are thousands of new companies being formed with people still trying to make the world a better place.
Re: How the Tech World Turned Evil
#37The Surveillance Industry has always been evil. This was apparent to anybody who was actually paying attention that since the creation of "web 2.0" - centralized control of everyone's data and software would create an irresistible center of power that would lead nowhere good.
Hence all the feel good marketing slogans like "Don't be evil" and whatnot - to goad individual developers to not think too hard about the direct implications of the technical architectures they were helping to build. And perhaps some of the initial founders even earnestly believed those slogans themselves, and were therefore actually benign or even benevolent. But such concentrated power inevitably attracts the type of people who are most certainly not.
It remains to be seen how much the political pendulum might swing back, but given that Democrats have been acting as controlled opposition for as long as I can remember, I'm not really expecting any sort of brakes any time soon. And pop culture takes still don't seem concerned with individualistically addressing these issues.
So our version of reality is basically set to be the evil corporate-overlord dystopia, and the loosely-connected band of individualist hackers who won't be televised. And Stallman has been thoroughly vindicated. It's time to get your ducks in a row.
Re: How the Tech World Turned Evil
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am sure you have read this same article over and over again in many different forms, I certainly have. Is it possible that we read it so often because it's obvious and undeniable? In fairness, I do agree with your assessment that the moralizing of figures like Musk and Zuckerberg has gotten old. But it's old because we've been criticizing them for years and nobody responds. Elon and Mark are net-negative fraudste…
I'm not interested in defending the trend as much as I am in understanding it, which the article promises but doesn't deliver. To begin to understand this, you have to examine the actions of the heroes as critically as the villains as defined in this piece. The article lays out clearly the negative desires of the villains, and the positive desires of the heroes, but do the heroes have any negative aspects? Does the E…
> Does the EU simply want to protect consumers or is there an argument that they are the law to unfairly targeting American companies?
Straight out of the corpos' DARVO. The motive isn't really relevant. The fact is that the GDPR creates an individual-empowering legal concept of having some control over the dossiers being kept on us, which is something sorely lacking in the US.
> I'm not interested in defending the trend as much as I am in understanding it
If you're actually interested in understanding, there is a very short answer that is as old as time: power corrupts.
We, by which I mean the collective tech/hacker community (especially those directly working for the surveillance industry), promulgated technical architectures that agglomerated too much centralized power. From that, the vectoralist class / capital taking hold of those reigns of power and using them for oppression of individuals was inevitable (motive: economic extraction).
Of those early individualist ideals, some earnestly believing founders fought and/or retired. Some changed as they became more powerful. And I'm sure some were simply masking from the start. I don't think picking through individuals to suss out the distinction really matters.
Re: How the Tech World Turned Evil
#39Industrial empires naturally have this tendency, once their power level is putting them in the same playground as small states, they become different entities, fighting for their own survival. The concentration of power of bureaucratic structures, no matter their nature, will always be in tension with individual freedom.
This is exactly why I don't understand the libertarian right in the US. Large corporations are just as capable of the unaccountable abuses that large governments are.
Like any political idealogy, it falls apart when compared to reality.
Which part of reality someone ignores/denies is what defines their ‘alignment’ in general.
Re: How the Tech World Turned Evil
#40Industrial empires naturally have this tendency, once their power level is putting them in the same playground as small states, they become different entities, fighting for their own survival. The concentration of power of bureaucratic structures, no matter their nature, will always be in tension with individual freedom.
This is exactly why I don't understand the libertarian right in the US. Large corporations are just as capable of the unaccountable abuses that large governments are.
That "right-" hyper-focus is the purposeful result of moderating corporate propaganda that neutralizes the philosophy, even making it positively conducive to corporate control. The same type of corruption occurs with more popular political philosophies like progressivism and conservatism. But it's less starkly pronounced as there are many more people defending their outcomes.