People might not care about those generes, but I can tell you with certainty that where I live, people are well aware of the datacenter being constructed on the other end of town, how the town commission rejected the proposal, how the big tech company sued them and said "this case is going to cost you so much money that you dont have and we do, so youd better settle quickly". And they did settle, and the construction began, and as part of the settlement the datacenter also forces the hand of the council to allow the datacenter to get a tax break for the next decade.
Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)
131–140 of 190 posts
Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)
#132I can't actually think of a single piece of tech made in the past ten years that has improved my life, at least not without large downsides. There's some embedded stuff, like lane assist or adaptive cruise control in my car, that I like, but the package as a whole... not really much of an improvement. It's not really bad as such that the tech industry want to attempt to make a smart home, or add software to a product…
>I can't actually think of a single piece of tech made in the past ten years that has improved my life
This is going to be controversial, but I feel that ChatGPT has improved my life.
Also e-bikes, 3D printers, and wireless earbuds really took off in the last ten years. Some of these were invented more than 10 years ago but saw significant improvements that brought them into the mainstream.
Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think hate is the perfect word.
I agree. For a normal person, when your day is pop-ups, cookie dialogs, dark patterns, auto-opt-in, + "Accept", subscriptions, smartphone-only ordering and customer service and endless-monetization... ...why use weaker words? of course, if you're working or starting a tech company, you cannot use strong words. You might alienate your many funding sources.
You’re better off bootstrapping a startup anyway.
Once you take VC money you might as well work in big tech. You’ll still be beholden to morons. I have no interest in making more friends in Silicon Valley than I already have.
Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
> lane assist or adaptive cruise control in my car The hilarious thing is that the EU decided that the assisting must be mandatory, and so now every time you turn on your 2024 or newer car, lane assist and "you're speeding!" warnings are turned on. At least there's still a way to turn them off/getting in the car means sit down, seat belt, mirrors, turn on the engine, go to settings and switch off the nanny modes...
this is leaking down to identity matching https://electrek.co/2026/07/06/tesla-cabin-camera-fsd-identi... and maybe: https://www.notateslaapp.com/software-updates/upcoming-featu...
Wow. This seems like a prelude to licensing the car for each driver (on a monthly basis) rather than buying it outright.
Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)
#135I can't actually think of a single piece of tech made in the past ten years that has improved my life, at least not without large downsides. There's some embedded stuff, like lane assist or adaptive cruise control in my car, that I like, but the package as a whole... not really much of an improvement. It's not really bad as such that the tech industry want to attempt to make a smart home, or add software to a product…
It's one of those things were I feel like a frog in boiling water. Drivers need smart assists in cars because I see everybody is checking messages and scrolling on their devices while driving. The tech is solving things but also creating a need for more tech to solve new problems. A lot of things also remain unsolved from the earlier stages of tech. Eg. what happens to our digital lives when we die, can we have legal…
>Drivers need smart assists in cars because
Na, drivers have always sucked. When I was growing up the amount of people that drove drunk was just insane. I have no idea how they survived, I guess a lot of them did not.
Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)
#136With 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?
It’s because they don’t pitch to the users. They pitch to the investors. Have noticed how everyone and their dog now has an “AI story” on their website? Yeah, because they won’t get funding otherwise. And these are not even the AI companies!
It's just what happens when money becomes completely disconnected from making useful things people want. If you get bought by a trillion dollar company you win, everyone else is just expected to lose.
Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)
#1371. Tech abuses its users on purpose and everyone knows it.
2. Tech companies are built on eating someone else’s lunch, mostly, and it’s not usually a fair redistribution of value.
Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
I don’t know how much it has ever been true, but it feels like today’s wealthy, especially in tech, have completely abandoned “noblesse oblige” - fulfilling social responsibilities that their wealth should bring them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_oblige
Hey man, Greed is Good, right?
Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
YouTube empowers millions of creators around the world. It's more about the fact that at a sufficiently large scale any platform faces the same issues. Some creators are terrible without breaking the rules, people argue, etc.
> YouTube empowers millions of creators around the world. Agree. But it empowers them to vie for attention in mostly the worst ways possible and, overwhelmingly, has led to a lot of bad content. There's some gems too. But, by and large, YouTube is less desirable for me to use than it was 10 years ago and I think it's because of the transformation into an industry, rather than an indie platform that also paid out. It…
Yep, the creators have to play the algorithm as much as the users get played by the algorithm. If you constantly pump out crap and buy promotions for your videos you can make money, but you put yourself on a treadmill you can't get off of.
Re: Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think when you couple extreme wealth inequality with extreme mis-allocation of capital (aka societal energy) with no buy in from the population, you (the Stanford educated elite - not you specifically) run the risk of getting your fucking head chopped off.
Sure, of course. I'm trying to draw a distinction between disagreement and hate. I'm not trying to eliminate either one.
To really understand where this can go you need to look at the robber barons of the 1800's, the Pinkertons, and the people that got into literal wars with them.
That is the express world people like Bezos want to bring back with company towns.
So, ya, hate would be a proper word.