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6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

joanwestenberg.com

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Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#111

Post by Animats »

imiric wrote: post #66
Animats wrote: post #56

Advertising. That's the problem. Computing has become a branch of the ad industry. What we need is a big tax on advertising and marketing. In the US, it doesn't create more demand, because most people are spent out. It just moves demand around. So much of that effort is a net lose that pushes prices up. (This might be politically possible during an "anti-tech" Trump administration.)

Advertising is a big part of it, sure. But it is merely a component of late-stage capitalism. Using psychological manipulation to sell products is the most profitable way of sustaining a business we've invented yet, but we have many other ways to unscrupulously exploit one another for financial gains. Humanity has been doing that for millennia, and we've gotten very good at it.

> most profitable way of sustaining a business we've invented yet

Which is why it's something to tax. As opposed to more productive endeavors.

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#112

Post by genewitch »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #38
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #3

While this author is of a younger generation, this really resonated with me as a Gen Xer. I feel there is so much disillusionment among folks that came of age during the 90s because there was so much techno optimism then, and it didn't quite turn out like we envisioned. Two things made me think about this recently: 1. I saw a Reddit post that was titled something like "The 90s were peak humanity. Enough tech to make…

Google and advertising killed everything off. Google is directly responsible for making tech and the world shitty. They started the whole making money of your attention thing and then everyone sort of just followed it. Not to mention the whole SEO industry that pushed off smaller, high quality websites for gargantuan mess of word salad articles. And finally now the present generation of developers are slavishly solvi…

my 8 year old (then 7) used to spend a lot of time in the roblox creation tool, whatever that's called. in 3rd grade we had access to Apple ][e and c in the school library - and i learned basic on an atari so it was relatively straightforward to code silly things that impressed other children - fill the screen with random characters (random colored characters on the c!) draw lines, make the printer buzz. windows 3 and/or 95 included abasic and qbasic (iirc). if you held down shift while booting, you'd drop to a prompt and could just write code.

I'm not sure where that leaves today's kids - there's nothing what you can just push a button and a few seconds later be at a prompt and just start typing commands and statements; further, nearly no-one will be impressed with filling a screen with random characters in the same way adults and kids were impressed back when there were 9 computers in the entire school and 4 didn't work.

I know there's projects out there that attempt to capture that magical spark of all of those 6502 and 808X machines just had by merely existing.

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#113

Post by BerislavLopac »

bratbag wrote: post #105
BerislavLopac wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 90s were peak humanity Yeah, sure. At the same time a large European country was falling apart in a bloody and cruel war that saw many innocent people outright murdered or displaced.

You will find a country doing that somewhere every decade, so it's irellivent to this analysis.

Let's agree to disagree -- I find it very relevant. "Peak humanity" is a very general statement, and ignoring large parts of the target cohort makes any analysis quite meaningless.

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#114

Post by 4ndrewl »

Ekaros wrote: post #70
tmpz22 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology innovation's highest priority has always been to move money from the middle class to the ownership class. Why so many people assume altruistic outcomes is beyond me. Why so many people see any other outcome of OpenAI then increased income inequality is beyond me.

In one sense I wonder if there ever was intention to make middle class rich... Increasing circulation allowed them to spend more money thus increase value of corporation same goes for pensions. Which then later were screwed out of the money stored there. Their value was to pump the stocks higher...

That's why the idea of the "middle class" was invented. You either live off the land/capital or you work for those people. You can't make the middle class rich enough that they don't have to work otherwise they'll realise they were working class all along.

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#115

Post by leocgcd »

Sort of a vapid piece.

The optimism and buy-in that excited people about tech from the debut of the iPhone until fairly recently was a function of PR and technology marketers-- like the author-- doing their jobs very well. For any industry, generating interest and excitement is more than a purely descriptive process. The magical venture doesn't just appear and then the marketers have the simple job of describing it. Marketers/strategists/PR people play a very important role surveying the project and then articulating a compelling vision. That vision then becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy since stakeholders (both creators and users) have bought into the promise of worth.

If strategists aren't able to see a path forward, to survey the field and identify the things that make the project worthwhile, exciting, sustainable, tactical, etc... then they're just not great at their job.

Admitting that you haven't really believed in anything you've worked on as a marketer is a bit like an actor admitting that someone else is reading their lines. A good marketer, like a good actor, lives in their promises like they are already real. The realer and more convinced you are, the more you can speak your vision into reality.

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#116

Post by prox »

m463 wrote: post #74
ryandrake wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to love computers and software. When the next great thing came out, I’d be an enthusiastic early adopter, and enjoyed the new powers the technology gave me. Now, whenever something new comes out, my first thought is: “how is this thing going to suck up my personal data and monetize me?” And my second thought is “how is this going to wreck some part of life and/or humanity and turn it into profits for the rich?…

That is how I felt. Computers made everyone's life better! My opinion is that "the big sellout" happened when apple introduced the iphone and the apple app store. and it basically came down to a couple nuances in their policies... #1 apps have unfettered network access #2 apple would never approve security apps like a firewall (because #1) and when a big player sets an example, it normalizes the situation for everyon…

This seems like historical revisionism. Not saying Apple wasn’t part of a certain trend, but it’s an odd bone to pick since Apple technically is one of the few companies that relies on hardware sales, not ad revenue.

Google is far more likely to fit your profile. It’s where ads (adwords and adsense) started to transform the web. First just a few cute banners at the top. And these days some sites just plaster the whole page with them.

Even still it’s hard to pick any singular company that started to make tech suck, they all followed or initiated trends that made things worse from a consumer standpoint.

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#117

Post by Animats »

genewitch wrote: post #95
copperx wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it means they're not bored with what tech gives them right now. In the past we adopted new startups such as JustinTV, YouTube, and Instagram because they gave us something we didn't have front and center. Live streaming, video, and stylized photos. Now every social network offers all kinds of media and in different engagement foemats, and the algorithms keep us entertained enough. There's not a whole lot of rea…

Hosting video is expensive; a Twitch streamer (Thor) mentioned that an 8-hour stream at 1080p with 8,000 viewers costs Twitch nearly $5,000, while 720p still costs around $1,300. Personally, I prefer 720p. It's easy to play on any device, the file sizes are much smaller, and the quality is fine. I don't need 4K for most content and save it for exceptional visuals like Godfrey Reggio's Trilogy or Yojimbo — one of the…

> Hosting video is expensive; a Twitch streamer (Thor) mentioned that an 8-hour stream at 1080p with 8,000 viewers costs Twitch nearly $5,000, while 720p still costs around $1,300.

That's what Peertube is for. The original video comes from a specific web site. If the viewer count goes up, the people watching it also stream it out. So a hugely popular video won't overload the source server.

This is not like Bittorrent. It's not distributed file storage, just distributed streaming. It's only a load on the viewer's system when they are watching the video. Now that there are large numbers of users with symmetrical network connections, this is a practical way to distribute video.

I put technical videos on Peertube because there are no commercial interruptions.[1] I recommend it for content which doesn't need "discovery" service - that is, users arrive from some other source than the hosting site.

[1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/7usCE3v2RrWK6nuoSr4NHJ

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#118

Post by Ekaros »

4ndrewl wrote: post #114
Ekaros wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In one sense I wonder if there ever was intention to make middle class rich... Increasing circulation allowed them to spend more money thus increase value of corporation same goes for pensions. Which then later were screwed out of the money stored there. Their value was to pump the stocks higher...

That's why the idea of the "middle class" was invented. You either live off the land/capital or you work for those people. You can't make the middle class rich enough that they don't have to work otherwise they'll realise they were working class all along.

Also class warfare. Can't have the working class and middle class team up and beat the rich... So have to give at least middle class some aspirations. I think elite is doing same thing with culture war now... Split them up and have them fight about something inconsequential instead of seeing true levels of inequality in wealth...

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#119

Post by imiric »

leocgcd wrote: post #115

Sort of a vapid piece. The optimism and buy-in that excited people about tech from the debut of the iPhone until fairly recently was a function of PR and technology marketers-- like the author-- doing their jobs very well. For any industry, generating interest and excitement is more than a purely descriptive process. The magical venture doesn't just appear and then the marketers have the simple job of describing it.…

> A good marketer, like a good actor, lives in their promises like they are already real. The realer and more convinced you are, the more you can speak your vision into reality.

Wow. Don't you see the problem with selling something that doesn't exist? There's a thin line between making up a story to make people buy a product, and straight up scamming people with a nonexistent product. Elizabeth Holmes was a genius marketer, but is that really somebody you want to idealize?

Re: 6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex

#120

Post by GJim »

keiferski wrote: post #61

It would be interesting if someone analyzed the “California communication style” and its effects on the startup industry. As someone that grew up on the East Coast, I often notice how the communication style on the West Coast is much less confrontational and more “everything is awesome”, which I think leads to the sort of fake enthusiasm the author grew tired of projecting. Of course, there’s no lack of hype and BS i…

> I often notice how the communication style on the West Coast is much less confrontational and more “everything is awesome”, which I think leads to the sort of fake enthusiasm the author grew tired of projecting.

I raise you British cynicism and the sarcastic piss taking that pervades our every day conversation. Frankly we are truly a world and culture away from California.

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