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Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)

sevarg.net

41–50 of 190 posts

Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)

#41
Because its...

1. All about lock in. Trap customers and their data.

2. No purchases, only rentals. You never own anything.

3. Agreements are worth nothing. Today's feature is tomorrows premium feature.

4. Gamification adds an extra edge of badness on the hopes that you'll get what you want.

5. "Updates" rarely help, but almost always harm, in the name of "security"

6. Mergers and acquisitions means nothing is ever safe. Purchasing BigCo (exit) can mean operations cease tomorrow.

7. Enshittification rules always rule how the service will degrade, but not at what speed

8. Easy click to subscribe, but show up in person wearing all black clothing to the basement hidden office behind the no-trespassing sign to the cigarette man to unsubscribe.

9. And even if you THINK you own hardware in your physical possession, firmware updates maintain the real owner and cripple functionality. (PS3 OtherOS, etc)

Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)

#42

With all the money floating around in tech you'd think PR would be solveable. But you still have AI founders going out in public and saying they want to get rid of jobs instead of some pitch about how easy work will get or you'll be happier or etc. Why?

Because they are selfish and would prefer to make millions selling to big companies who want to pay less for labour.

I mean, to be fair, basically the only way to raise the amount of capital required to keep growing LLMs was to sell a story at this scale.

I think the real error was the notion that they could sell this story to investors without the rest of the population noticing.

Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)

#43
post #2

Name an industry anyone likes, aside from the money they might be making off it. They're all now hated for the same reasons, caused by the same, scarily small, group of people.

Restaurants, gyms, cinemas, Hollywood, sports leagues, book publishing, amazon.

People will have some criticisms of each of these but the average person probably appreciates them more than dislikes them.

Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)

#44
post #2

Name an industry anyone likes, aside from the money they might be making off it. They're all now hated for the same reasons, caused by the same, scarily small, group of people.

I don't think we, as common engineers, can absolve ourselves of all blame. For a time we were in incredible demand and all we've made of it is: some people earned enough to retire early, buy nice cars, or start their own business.

But that demand could have been turned into real power. Now it's too late.

Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)

#45
post #2

Name an industry anyone likes, aside from the money they might be making off it. They're all now hated for the same reasons, caused by the same, scarily small, group of people.

I'd say farming. Not agriculture in general, Monsanto is one of the most hated companies, so is John Deere, and farmers hate them too, but the ones working on the field, preferably crops over livestock.

I think that farmers are somehow immune despite having their fair share of evil because we all understand that without them, we would all die.

Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few founders do this and the ones who do are solving their own problems. For Anthropic it's primarily hiring. But as a PR person I can guarantee you it's not possible to go around such perception shifts through money alone.

> go around such perception shifts through money alone. Have the people with money considered doing more charitable acts/events for the people with less money to demonstrate that the tech industry isn't just here to extract wealth from the poor/many and transfer it to rich/few?

> to demonstrate that the tech industry isn't just here to extract wealth from the poor/many and transfer it to rich/few?

I think the problem is that the tech industry in large is just here to extract wealth from the many and transfer it to the few. That's why it's focused on scale.

People aren't dumb, and most of the time they can see when they're on the receiving end of an extractive relationship - even if there's lots of PR work going on to hide that reality from them.

Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)

#47
Some good points, but I think it still treats “tech” as too monolithic. It’s not simply that tech leaders made bad choices or that products are inevitably enshittified. If I had to summarize the root cause I’d say it’s that the scaling properties of tech have enabled capitalist and political excesses with a velocity and power never before seen, and it happened so quickly that we really haven’t had time to even understand what’s happening systematically, let alone update societal norms and governance to address the problems.

Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)

#48
post #15

For the people I know, the biggest things are: (1) Addiction engineering, and the fact that the tech industry found a way to transform what was supposed to be a machine to improve human education and cognition into a digital version of tobacco or a casino. I am personally disgusted by this. If you're working on a pop "social" app or a game and designing it to have a "compulsion loop," you are doing mind control and y…

I think you've got good points. With respect to #3 I think there's a general problem with concentration of capital and general "hoarding". One example. Berkshire Hathaway has $400 billion dollars in the bank that they can't invest because they need high returns. So the capital is locked up. (The banks who hold the funds are restricted in what they can invest in). Multiply this by loads of other companies. Add in fund…

I need to qualify my "I don't care if there are quadrillionaires" comment.

In theory, all other things aside, it is true. I mean, look up at the stars. For all I know there are functionally immortal super-minds out there who have not known pain for millions of years. Their existence is not a problem for me.

But "we live in a society," and unfortunately other peoples' extreme wealth can cause problems for me.

One is by bidding up assets. The super-rich park their money. Parked money goes into things like PE. PE can't find enough stuff to do with it, so they do shit like buy up housing and hold it off the market to profit from real estate appreciation. That makes it harder for me to find a good place to live. That's just one example.

I actually coined a term for the above: financial pollution. Financial pollution is any time someone else's money being invested does harm rather than helps, usually by driving up asset prices, massively distorting a market, or being invested in the creation of rent-seeking schemes. A classic example of financial pollution would be the real estate market in cities that allow a lot of overseas investors to park money in real estate.

Financial pollution is the opposite of productive investment that does things like creates jobs and builds things.

Another is that extreme wealth distorts politics. One of the libertarian things I like in theory is the idea of separation of economy and state, but in practice that's a brutally hard thing to achieve... much harder than separation of church and state. It is true from a social contract and legal point of view that money is not the same as physical coercion, and the state has a monopoly on the latter, but if you have loads of money you can buy the people who run the state and therefore obtain direct access to physical coercion. That's the problem. The super-rich can buy the government and then use force to maintain their status or pursue their own personal cultural, religious, or national peeves and hobby horses.

Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)

#50
post #15

For the people I know, the biggest things are: (1) Addiction engineering, and the fact that the tech industry found a way to transform what was supposed to be a machine to improve human education and cognition into a digital version of tobacco or a casino. I am personally disgusted by this. If you're working on a pop "social" app or a game and designing it to have a "compulsion loop," you are doing mind control and y…

+1 especially on (2). In that sense the article being from 2023 is itself interesting as a document of change. The article mentioned no one cared about Bezos for example, but with Data Centers wreaking havoc on communities with energy prices, water supply and noise while he takes over Venice, suddenly it was in people's backyards and turns out they do care.

On (1) I do like "Annoyance Economy" as an extension of that (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/12/business/annoyance-econom...)

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