The techlash that never happened
eriktorenberg.substack.com
The techlash that never happened
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Re: The techlash that never happened
#2And the media learned a hard lesson: Success against tech requires long-term criticism; but they turned everything into clickbait and put many criticisms behind paywalls. Nobody was interested after more than a week, because nobody had the attention span or interest in paying for stories about a personal squabble.
Re: The techlash that never happened
#3The "media sentiment change happened because Facebook ad revenue surpassed newspaper advertising revenue" makes a cute soundbite and there's some correlation graphs, but the details presented here are pretty weak.
E.g. the NYT started being negative towards facebook because of "filter bubbles" undercutting them in a conspiratorial way instead of a "that sounds bad" way - HN is mostly negative on filter bubbles too. Same with Juicero.
And the "economic attack" on Hollywood, for instance, is hardly so - the initial investor-money-burning decade of streaming talked about here was WONDERFUL for most of Hollywood. You get to make way more shows, and they aren't supposed to all be lowest-common-denominator reality stuff? That was a bonanza for actors, writers, directors.
I'd also want to see media sentiment of TV, streaming; ad revenue comparisons of that, and all the other options in the world between a binary "newspaper" and "tech" in that one graph.
Not to mention some research on consumer sentiment not just media sentiment. Does the author really believe the average Joe wasn't getting more negative about FB over that time span? Where was "Tech" on that "people think the president should do something about" list five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago? 40% is lower than oil and airlines; what's the rate of change? (One might say "yes, the public got more negative because the media pushed the narrative" which would be a pretty interesting argument, but it's notably not what this article is saying - the author is saying that the public "Techlash" basically "never happened" outside the media. (But that's not really new, right - Tech criticizing the "media" [or slices of it] is also a decades-long well-established practice. This ain't a one-way street.)
Yet spend a week on HN and you'll see that even in the industry, there's a LOT of organic negative sentiment against certain tech companies. I would agree with a claim that the media is oversimplifying that to "frustrating with tech," I don't agree that it's not a real trend with real causes independent of media reporting. We all use these products, we can all see the gradual shittification of them - FB, TikTok, Snap, Google Search...
Re: The techlash that never happened
#4The "media sentiment change happened because Facebook ad revenue surpassed newspaper advertising revenue" makes a cute soundbite and there's some correlation graphs, but the details presented here are pretty weak. E.g. the NYT started being negative towards facebook because of "filter bubbles" undercutting them in a conspiratorial way instead of a "that sounds bad" way - HN is mostly negative on filter bubbles too. S…
The bit about ad revenue was actually specifically called out here as probably not the story.
The interesting part to me is the overall positive sentiment towards tech in general, because you are right - at least for specific companies, sentiment as reported by a local poll of people I play games with, Elon and FB are the literal devil.
Re: The techlash that never happened
#5And the media learned a hard lesson: Success against tech requires long-term criticism; but they turned everything into clickbait and put many criticisms behind paywalls. Nobody was interested after more than a week, because nobody had the attention span or interest in paying for stories about a personal squabble.
"in an alternate reality" (/s) some media conglomerate invented equivalents of YouTube, reddit, and Twitter, and they never have to ask for permission to use your content in their pieces because it's part of the TOS for those sites anyway.
Kinda glad they didn't
Re: The techlash that never happened
#6The "media sentiment change happened because Facebook ad revenue surpassed newspaper advertising revenue" makes a cute soundbite and there's some correlation graphs, but the details presented here are pretty weak. E.g. the NYT started being negative towards facebook because of "filter bubbles" undercutting them in a conspiratorial way instead of a "that sounds bad" way - HN is mostly negative on filter bubbles too. S…
I felt the same way about the article. Large amounts of conspiratorial conjecture presented, little to show for it.
Re: The techlash that never happened
#7The top graph (Gallup 2017 Business & Industry Ranking Net Positive Scores) is 6 years old. 2022 results can be found here:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/12748/business-industry-sector-...
Computer Industry is now 3rd and the Net Positive has gone from 67 to 35.
Internet Industry has gone from 5th to the bottom half of the list and the Net Positive has gone from 41 to -2.
Perhaps the Techlash was just a little late.
Re: The techlash that never happened
#8Of all the absolute horseshit in the article, the most obviously wrong is saying that "tech doesn't play both sides of the political aisle".
So obviously wrong if you look at any single company. Just recently, we saw how FTX was lobbying hard for both sides.
And there absolutely has been a backlash against tech. Ask any Facebook employee how people react when they say where they work.
Re: The techlash that never happened
#9The "media sentiment change happened because Facebook ad revenue surpassed newspaper advertising revenue" makes a cute soundbite and there's some correlation graphs, but the details presented here are pretty weak. E.g. the NYT started being negative towards facebook because of "filter bubbles" undercutting them in a conspiratorial way instead of a "that sounds bad" way - HN is mostly negative on filter bubbles too. S…
Idk that economic “attack” is good phrasing but the bundling of video content combined with tools/platforms/monetization for user generated video content absolutely had a devastating effect on legacy video media. Maybe, in your words, the initial money-burning provided a lift, but now Hollywood writers are striking for more pay and Netflix is one of they key bogeymen.
Re: The techlash that never happened
#10Of all the absolute horseshit in the article, the most obviously wrong is saying that "tech doesn't play both sides of the political aisle". So obviously wrong if you look at any single company. Just recently, we saw how FTX was lobbying hard for both sides. And there absolutely has been a backlash against tech. Ask any Facebook employee how people react when they say where they work.
What?
Internet companies are up there with trade unions and Hollywood in donating to the left:
https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/most-partisan...
Facebook is an exception. They really let their brand collapse on multiple levels. Looking at the rest of FAANG (MAGMA? whatever) the situation is pretty different. Nobody at Microsoft is ashamed to tell their families that they make dashboards to help visualize uptime metrics for cloud services. Nobody at Apple is ashamed to tell their friends that they can't talk about whatever they do for work.