I 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, but it's increasingly being done without consideration for the users.
People hate the tech industry, and that includes those who work in it, because it's pretty clear that the industry really doesn't give a shit about it's users, because the users are rarely the customers anymore.
In terms of consumer benefit in tech we've been at stasis for a long time. My computing experience isn't that much different now than it was 15 or 20 years ago. Sure, my computer and connectivity are far faster now, and thanks to Apple Silicon I can go whole days at conferences without plugging my laptop in, but those are incremental improvements not sea changes. We did fine with 4-hour laptops in 1999.
Also a number of "improvements" just aren't, like smart home devices and IoT crap. Virtually none of those things have made good on the marketers' promises, and 100% of them require some tech family member to end up sysadmining the TV or the thermostat or the light switch, and having to do that kind of crap for things that used to Just Work in the most basic sense is insane.
There's been a lot of heavy lifting in the smart speaker space, and it IS true that my 86 year old mother enjoys being able to ask Siri to play any song she wants, but that kind of thing seems picayune compared to what middle-aged nerds thought the second quarter of the 21st century would bring us.
The only area that comes immediately to mind for ME that includes staggering advances is medical care. I had a hip replacement a few years ago that was an OUTPATIENT procedure. A dear friend of mine ignored symptoms and therefore only "caught" his colon cancer well into stage 4 -- and yet still lived 6 years with pretty high quality of life. Time was, a stage 4 diagnosis meant "uh, maybe don't renew your cable this month." Another pal has progressive MS; 15 years ago, there were no therapies AT ALL for it. Now there is one, and it's making a difference for him and his family.
Nothing on that scale has shown up from "the tech industry" in a long time.
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 access so it doesn't rely solely on personal responsibility to share account keys and passwords. How is our digital life secured and backed up without having to come up with home grown solutions and be a sys admin or pay for cloud storage. Why can't we decide on standard protocols for messaging, we had SMS, now we have different messaging apps, people who aren't tech savvy lose years of correspondence when switching devices because they failed to import or transfer data. We still haven't solved data archiving to free us from bit rot and degradation, things like project silica are only in the research phases. All the while, we generate more and more data and make our lives completely dependent on digital services and devices. More and more bank branches are cashless now. We had a massive power grid outage a few years ago and at the convenience store we couldn't buy anything, there was no way to issue a paper receipt or anything like that, the store employees were clueless. I still remember a time when you could buy on tab/credit, they would just write it up, or at least take cache and issue handwritten receipts. And now we're piling AI on top of everything, but operating systems are still crap, software is mostly crap and we have to update our devices every few years because they become slow or stop working. And it feels like younger generations don't mind because it's the new normal, they grew up with smart devices.
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.
I worked in car sales. Most of my coworkers drove drunk once a week or more. So basically I've seen 10+ people drive drunk 100+ times, and no doubt they do it more outside my view. No one ever had an accident.
For sure drunk driving increases your odds of an accident. But people make it sound 3-4 beers and you're bound to have an accident. We should be more honest about it.
What a weird straw pile to die one. No one is saying "four beers and you're guaranteed an accident". They're saying "drive drunk and you are a piece of shit, don't do it ever ever ever". There's no room for nuance here because the targets of this advice have lethally impaired judgement. Wiggle room will be exploited by people too drunk to know better, which equals preventable death.
My optometrist told me that when he started clinical practice years ago he was shocked to discover how many people were driving around with severe visual impairments. The usual DMV eye exam is way too easy.
I sold cars for a living so I pay attention to randoms in cars more than most probably. The amount of people (mostly women) sitting WAYYY too low in their car is shocking. I don't know how they can even see most of what's near in front of them.
The way too close to the steering wheel also shocks me, but I guess with that one theyre going to just hurt themselves.
When id sell a car, or even on test drives, I'd try to help them adjust the seat to a sane position but most people that do it wrong seem to be pretty set in their ways and don't want to change it even with some friendly advice and showing them the seat goes way up. It's almost like they don't like looking bigger in their car or something.
>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.
Being able to use ChatGPT is useful, but it is significantly offset by how many business interactions are now mediated solely by chatgpt, and I'm not sure on balance my life has been improved.
Those are real tech IMO. Consumer media type software isn't 'tech', at least not regular useful software sense. That would be like calling addictive drugs and slot machines an innovation or technology.
e-bikes are a terror. Motorized vehicles operating in places where motorized vehicles aren't allowed (so like all modern tech, the benefit is the abuse/loophole they allow a small subset to benefit from). People treating them like toys and riding horribly resulting in lots of accidents. Nah, they aren't a plus.
I think the health benefits would be the ability to get out and be involved with the world. When I was living in Chinatown I was amazed by how much healthier the elderly people were simply from going to the park each day and hanging out with their friends or dancing (Chinese people, at least in the US, seem to LOVE ballroom dancing!). The problem is that not everyone can live in a strong community where they can walk to a local park.
They are actually pedaling and moving, but they need less strength and stamina to get further. They dont end up stuck downhill unable to climb up. This latter risk is something that really forces old people to put out of normal bikes. For older person, the e-bike is roughly the exercise they need. And it gets you to places, it does not limit them to small area.
The old person alternative to e-bike is not normal bike, it is nothing, because their bodies are just like that - weak and old.
> 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...
I could see that being enshittified soon. From what I've seen the deal is often "you lease the car instead of owning it, but you get a much nicer car than you could otherwise afford". I could see it switching to "You get a regular car but you still don't own it."
The voluntary adoption of modern tech products says otherwise. People aren't forced to wear Apple Watches, order food through doordash, look up things on ChatGPT, ride Waymos etc. And yet everything I listed above is very popular.
Population wide revealed preferences speak volumes despite what loud critics who appointed themselves as the people's ambassadors may say.
I think it is important to keep in mind that people's "revealed preferences" are dependent on the society they live in. E.g. are people talking to ChatGPT about their deepest fears because they want to or because society has under invested in counselors like pastors, school guidance counselors, licensed therapist, etc.
The silicon valley tech industry went from being a consumer products industry to being an advertising industry. Consumer products companies see the person buying their stuff as the customer. Advertising companies see them as the product.
I certainly hate that even when working on ecommerce projects, I have indirectly contributed for people to lose their jobs, as chains close their physical stores.
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?
Why? Because their messaging is not addressing the general public, but their investors. And they've realized that their investors are really receptive to panic-baiting (we'll get rid of jobs, ASI is right around the corner, p(doom) = 25% etc).
This doesn't answer GPs question, though: Why is a panic-baiting "we'll get rid of jobs" better than some gain-baiting "we'll make your workforce 10x more productive"? Why is panic a better response to investors than gain?
We got:
- A: "AI helps in automating tedious tasks"
- B: "Your workforce can be more motivated and productive"
- C: "You can do more with fewer people"
Why not advertise A → B, stop there and let their customers do the reasoning for B → C themselves? Why go straight to a hyperbolic A → C and swallow all the hate that comes with it?
My own presumption is that we got that strange fetish for optimization (C) and just don't trust our own ambitions to make the potential gain in productivity (B) work any other way.
It goes back to Warren Buffett quote "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." That is what it is. I thought it was just funny but wrong comment, but lately realized Buffett was 100% right all along.
Panic just makes it sound more real, I think. They were saying stuff like "Eek, our technology is TOO dangerous and advanced and we need to be regulated :-O" when they definitely didn't actually want to be regulated. ("They" meaning at least Sam Altman).
"Your workforce will be more productive" sounds much less impressive than "OMG you will literally not need employees anymore!! 10x profits!!"
Because it's being sold off as the terminal technology and if you aren't in on the final and ultimate technological innovation you will be for forever behind and never catch up.
> 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?
Or compare Musk's promises to what's delivered. His self-driving timelines has its own Wikipedia page; how much he opined DOGE could save could be falsified by the top-level breakdown of the US federal budget. He used to be worried about AI, "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon", now he's saying he wants more Tesla shares for the "robot army" which his SpaceX presentations say will be a billion* strong.
* though if you just naïvely apply the numbers here, that factory will also be "on fire": https://www.terafab.ai
It is not PR issue. AI founders in fact do want to get rid of jobs and create permanent underclass. That is their actual real goal. Better PR would make people realize it later, but that it is. And whether we realize it or not does not matter. Tech CEOs they already captured so much power, that it does not matter what "masses" think, feel or whether they suffer.
AI founders are OK with people hating them, because people truly absolutely dont matter.
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.
If they end up getting heavily regulated, then it's definitely an error. The Fable export controls kerfuffle was definitely downstream of all the hype so it seems to be having some impact.
I think the real question is, if the big tech companies are so all knowing and all powerful, with so much control over media and messaging, then why is their PR so bad?
"Get rid of jobs" was a pitch to investors. They needed a new trillion dollar idea. For it to be worth a trillion dollars it has to take a trillion dollars from somewhere. They looked at the economy and decided the only place it could come from is white collar payroll.
Unfortunately for them more than just the investors were paying attention to the pitch. So now they are trying to say "of course it won't unemploy people (wink) it may even create more jobs (snicker)."
> For it to be worth a trillion dollars it has to take a trillion dollars from somewhere.
Musk's SpaceX TAM is roughly as you say, it's "subsume all currently existing desk jobs", which makes it simultaneously absurdly over-confident in the short term and treating this all as a zero-sum game where those jobs just go away and no new (potentially also automatable) jobs get invented, which in turn says he doesn't think anywhere is going to shift from primary and secondary economies to tertiary economies.
Zuckerberg may be full of himself, but does at least (pay someone else to?) write a vision that at least has growth-sounding phrases in it: https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/
> 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.
> 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.
they're not pitching to the average person, they're talking to C-levels, private equity, other ruthless billionaires, etc.
and when you have a solution that will eliminate the workers, why do you care about lying to the workers? instead of being lambasted about being blunt and evil you'll be lambasted about being duplicitous and evil
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.
Tech companies possess immense resources and huge potential to shape public discourse. Activists (that often includes journalists today) wish to exert power over tech companies for that reason. In the era of social media, weaponized complaining and astroturfed rage/hate is a very effective method of exerting actual power and inluence. When you see sentences like "Why do people hate X?", understand that this may be a statement pursuing a goal (we need you to believe that people hate X, so you should too), not a genuine quesion.
I am not a fan of tech companies _at all_, BTW. But the enemy of an enemy is not always a friend.
I think this article overestimates how much the average person knows about tech. People know who Musk, Bezos, and Gates are, but hardly anyone outside of tech knows who Collison is. Most don't know much about VC funding either, but they certainly can see when products have become too smart to the point where they get needlessly complicated.
Hating the tech industry is mainly seen amongst the first world countries and the rich educate, high status people amongst them.
I posit that the reasons are
- the need for conservatism and slowing down progress is inherent in people. Last time it was opposing LGBTQ and racial discrimination and now it is technology. Its the same mode of opposition, people just don't like chaotic progress.
- people who have good jobs and high status want to _conserve_ it and not lose position - tech industry keeps threatening the status quo again and again
- for some reason cynicism is seen as signalling a more mature worldview while optimism is seen as childish when the historical trend points to optimism instead
parent poster is doing what is known as 'deflection' and is trying to upend the conversation my bringing in mostly-unrelated hot-button topics, like gender, racism, and other terms that elicit strong reactions.
or they're just idiots, but with 50% of the internet being bots who can say?
That's a weirdly optimistic view of technology. Specially the comparison to homophobia and racism. Yes, tech has solved people's basic but real needs for communication, banking, entertainment, etc. Then after a certain level, without aggressive dark patterns, people's needs for tech were basically met. No one needed social media, we needed social networks. No one needed inescapable "algorithms"¹ besides the ones trying to screw us over. What is this "status quo" you're talking about? And what is this technology progress that is threatening it?
¹ using the term "algorithms" here in its colloquial non-tech sense.
I personally love social media because it brings different cultures together. Infinity immigration has been tried but not in a nice way. Next best thing is social media - bringing cultures together in a marketplace and having ideas beat eachother is important for a civilisation.
Without social media you would have corners of culture getting stuck on whatever ideas they had from 2000 years ago. With social media these stale ideas get beaten by good ones.
That's fine, if that's your choice. Reddit was awesome at first because it was a hot pot of cultures. But we lost that control. You don't see what you want unless you fight hard against the algo.
> Last time it was opposing LGBTQ and racial discrimination and now it is technology.
The attacks on and hate of trans people are on the rise. There seem to be literal strategy of preventing blacks and women from career rise in military and government. And all of these are enabled and helped by tech. The radicalization and hate grows due to our algorithms.
> tech industry keeps threatening the status quo again and again
Tech industry is the status quo, it represents people with good jobs and high status looking down on everyone else. It was like that for decades now. Tech industry is all about creating monopolies, consolidating and killing the competition.
> when the historical trend points to optimism instead
It does not. We failed to manage climate change. The world is moving from stability to chaos, toward more wars. The politics of several countries is turning toward openly fascists. The powerful are less and less accountable, amassing more and more power. Corruption is at unprecedented levels.
Good times already were. We are going toward bad times and things will start improving only after they will get really bad first.
> a lot of people have now realized this and are explicitly fighting back against trans demands.
They are literally actively trying to create the world where trans people are hurt as much as possible. They are not on the defense, they are the assholes.
>Blacks and women have historically benefitted from explicit racial and gender preferences
Man, no one got more historical benefits from explicit racial and gender preferences as white men.
> which looks like "preventing blacks and women from career rise" from the perspective of a pro-affirmative-action person.
They are literally prevented from progress solely due to their race and gender. As was historical norm for a long time.
> the poltical demands trans people make in the explicit name of trans rights necessarily entail enlisting the state to help destroy gender distinctions
This is hysterical in both senses of the word, and also nonensical.
> Both of these phenomena are contemporary American poltical currents, and don't have much to do with the tech industry in and of itself.
The mode of opposition against culture change to benefit these groups is the same mode of opposition against technology. Both exist to preserve status quo - to keep the same hierarchies.
“Hating the tech industry is mainly seen amongst the first world countries and the rich educate, high status people amongst them.”
For the record I used to read noahpinion all the time. Then I developed critical thinking skills. It’s not a compliment that it was so easy for me to recognize you as a reader of his. You should learn how to think for yourself.
I still check his blog occasionally to see what the tech elite / alphabet boys want me to think. It’s become surprisingly easy to deduce their strategy.
“people who have good jobs and high status want to _conserve_ it and not lose position - tech industry keeps threatening the status quo again and again”
I did answer your question. Are you saying the above quote is sarcasm?
You asked why I highlighted techs impact on the upper middle class. It’s because you singled them out as the primary opponents of tech multiple times.
I didn’t use any insults at all. Where are you seeing insults? I’m giving you valuable advice.
1. Tech is associated with a lot of the issues affecting society right now, while other business sectors often aren't. Data centres and the rising price of computer components, social media addiction, gambling apps, surveillance, etc. These are all things in the news or affecting people's daily lives, and the 'tech industry' tends to get the blame for them.
2. Many of the people involved tend to have a bad reputation, even compared to other industries. Musk is the obvious one, but Bezos, Zuckerberg and others like them don't exactly have a great reputation with the general public.
3. As much as I can't blame them sometimes, the media absolutely hates the tech industry and the companies operating in it. Thanks in part to the large social media platforms all but annihilating traditional journalism as a business, there's a lot of hatred aimed at the companies responsible as a result. If you see any news article about a tech related topic that isn't a product announcement (and maybe even then), it's probably going to be a negative one about the dangers and issues with tech.
We reading the same media here? All the major tech news publications like the Verge or ArsTechnica take a highly skeptical tone towards AI.
Nearly every major newspaper company is actively suing AI companies over copyright infringement. They have been quite outspoken that they see Google's AI overviews as an existential threat to their business.
I was on the web in the late 90s! I don't recall seeing anything like this, although it certainly may have existed. Animated cursors yes (CometCursor!), but not little animations chasing your cursor.
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)
Or rather, every economist reads the first 20 pages of Smith's Wealth Of Nations, and basically skips everything afterwards.
Like... This gem: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
In my opinion tech used to be fun and we used to create products that actually empower people. Think MySpace, early-days Facebook, Soundcloud, Ableton Live etc. They exist to empower the masses to connect and to create.
Today the business model has made every products and contents to be enshittified.
We've optimised for the wrong thing and not only the common people hate the tech industry. Even I no longer feels the joy of working in tech.
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 feels like it went from a farmer's market with a lot of local farmers selling their goods to shopping at Walmart.
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.
I think that just highlights how “empowerment” through tech is biased towards producers, which makes sense because that aligns with the usual business propositions.
For consumers, YT is not empowering. It fulfills a need, well enough to tie them to the platform. But it is obviously not set up to hand them any more power than to serve that goal. You want to shield yourself from wasting time here? Sorry, not sorry, our goal is to steal your attention and entertain you just enough that you keep scrolling.
YT can be/was empowering for the viewer. Product choices have made it far more of a pointless timesuck and consumer hostile but it still remains the place where I can find a video of a guy taking the front off the same model dishwasher that I have to fix the latch in the soap dispenser while he points out how to do it without permanently destroying the clips that hold it together.
I'd argue the very expression "creating content" is a euphemism for producing shit, of which algorithm driven platforms like Youtube excel at promoting.
Information systems has always been about empowering business leaders to produce more with less human effort. In that respect, AI for example has been a game changer. Everything else was a sideshow.
If you've been leaning hard on programming and lack the people skills to join the business class, that's on you. Things are going to get very hard for you in the near future, if they haven't already. People skills are the new moat.
I didn't say you did. But the industry is full of people with technical acumen but little in the way of people skills or a knack for business needs; and in the supposedly halcyon days of the past many of them could grow rich, or at least popular, by developing something cool. These people are going to have a very bad time.
At the start founders got the joy from making products that makes people happy. Then it inevitably evolves to chasing the dopamine of achieving larger and larger numbers based on some quantifiable metrics.
Re the linked piece, I'm concerned about people saying "they hate us" when they really mean "they disagree with us" or "they seem skeptical of what we say." It can easily become click bait.
The language changes, sure ... but equating disagreement with the emotion of hatred? Maybe that language change is a bad idea? Just spitballing here.
I'm with you in spirit wrt lowering the temp and avoiding clickbait. I want the internet and the world to be a better place with more peace and loving kindness, creativity and connection. But in this case -- describing the general public's feelings towards the ultra-rich, IMHO "disagree" and "skeptical" are just too watered-down; they don't convey all the legitimate feelings of resentment, fear, distaste, distrust, indignation, etc that feed into something typically described as "hate". ):
Maybe you hate a certain politician, or maybe you just hate that one annoying commercial that they keep playing. In either case, the tech industry probably helped make it possible. Yes, they hate you.
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.
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.
i can disagree with my friend's opinion about if a cake is tasty.
i can disagree with my neighbor's opinion that his wife is pretty or his kids are smart.
i hate entrenched capital that is trying to obliterate my ability to work, and which will leave me to starve, and which is very, very blunt about how little they care about us.
For a normal person, when your day is pop-ups, cookie dialogs, dark patterns, auto-opt-in, <100-pages-of-legalese> + "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.
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.
I think one reason it's because many prominent tech leaders act like assholes or scammers: Zuck, Altman, Kalanick, Musk, and even "do no evil" Google has changed to "do no evil, unless you can make a lot of money doing it".
so it doesn't give people confidence that the tech industry is doing anything that benefits the average person; mostly they're just looking to make as much $$ as possible and screw everything else, including our planet's future. basically Gordon Gekko's of the 21st Century.
> And it goes on, and on, and on. Modern “tech companies” haven’t come up with any aspect of life they haven’t tried to “disrupt,” for the purposes of addicting you and then enshitifying the service by shoving ads in front of your eyes. Woohoo, the future!
Also:
1. Tech is full or arrogant assholes who thing they know better than everyone. That leads to things like ham-handed attempts at gaslighting. It's especially grating when it's coming from some 25 year old kid.
2. The whole "making the world better" facade has fallen away. It's pretty clear a lot of them are selfish, greedy fucks. See: jamming AI and everyone's face and all the variations of "stop hiring humans."
Funnily enough, I ran across an article this morning titled "What you hate about AI is the capitalism." and I feel like you can basically apply that to all tech!
It’s probably naive to assume a different system would cure all our ills. But I do wonder - if humanity acted for the collective good instead of individual self-interest, how different would our technology be? And how different would we be because of it?
Why wouldn't they? It patronizes and infantilizes most of them. You can see the father knows best attitude all over this very forum. Calls for locking users out of their phones for their own good are seen here daily and that is just one example. When something big acts continually to disempower a group of people, of course some of them will resent it.
People hate the tech industry because it has negative effects on their lives, and these effects are deliberate rather than incidental.
There are, of course, some good people/companies/projects in the tech industry, but think about the overall impression of the industry as a whole: careless and malevolent.
The tech industry and its figureheads have
- Lied consistently about their capabilities
- Brazenly flouted the law
- Shoved ads and planned obsolescence and surveillance into everything
- Increased prices again and again
- Supported oppressive governments and war crimes
- Gleefully attempted to remove many people's livelihoods
- Predicted that they would end the world, and then doubled down on the same path
- Pushed technology with the primary aim of CSAM or deepfake pornography
I could keep listing, and again, this isn't every single person in the tech industry. But if you group them all together, you have to take the bad with the good, and there's a lot of bad.
Frankly, the real question is why don't more people hate the tech industry?
(Dis)honorable mentions to the current waves of gleeful surveillance state enablement and gambling by any other name, the latter even directly preceded by desperately trying to get everyone's less techy relatives to bag-hold crypto pump n dumps
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.
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.
This specific quote actually belongs to Luanne Platter
"I learned something really important at college today. I don't wanna be there! Some people are meant to go to college, and some people are meant to go to beauty school. And I'm in beauty school!"
Is this a sarcasm? I hate them trying to upsell their stuff or lie about the products(almost all of the product marketing in beauty industry is a lie) or oversell their services.
If I were to guess, I think what you mean interacting with them not the money extraction part?
I mean sure... but I vote for education tax levies whenever they come up and choose to live somewhere where they pass. I wouldn't call my emotions about it negative.
The problem isn't capitalism, well it's not JUST capitalism. If you give any group of individuals that level of wealth control, the same pattern repeats. They can be shareholders, board directors, or commissars or general secretaries of the people's party, a prince or a duke, or the first citizen.
It doesn't matter, all you need to replicate the same problems is concentration of wealth and power and the ability to direct it.
I have to tighten your earlier point a bit first: it is not just absolute concentration of wealth that causes this, it is high levels of inequality, e.g. lots of people in misery with a few folks that have ridiculous riches.
I'm pretty sure the commoners (and even more so, the slaves!) in Rome, Egypt or Imperial China didn't love the system either.
However, I think the average modern-day, communist Chinese person has seen such a rise in standards of living (one billion people pulled out from poverty!) that they don't really hate the system despite there also being high wealth concentration amongst party and business elites.
And yet all this power in the hands of the very few are only there because the rest of us don't know any better than coordinating for their benefit rather than coordinating in any other way.
As someone who has worked in tech for over 20 years, I think the backlash against modern technology is not hard to understand.
A few things stand out:
The social isolation of the digital age. We spend more time staring into phones than looking each other in the eye.
The polarization created and amplified by social media platforms.
The spread of disinformation, radicalization, and algorithmically optimized outrage.
A developer and founder culture that is still heavily male-coded, often morally shallow, and too quick to treat empathy as weakness or inefficiency.
The hype-and-hustle economy that startup culture has helped normalize inside American hyper-capitalism. The robber barons of earlier generations have been replaced by tech bros, growth hackers, and social media personalities who are often rewarded more for manipulation than for building anything durable.
The erosion of the middle class and the normalization of unstable gig work, especially for Gen Z and millennials, leading to a lower standard of living for many younger Americans.
Crypto, and the amount of fraud, speculation, and wasted energy that came with it.
Now AI: not just the technology itself, but the way it is being funded, marketed, and deployed, often with little regard for human creativity, labor, consent, or meaning.
Yes, this is a negative list. Technology has obviously produced enormous good as well.
But it says something important that many younger people increasingly experience modern tech not as liberation, but as addiction, surveillance, manipulation, and spiritual exhaustion.
The article really sums it up perfectly. It's incredibly see to see topical reasons why people fucking hate everything tech touches. You can't buy a TV without it being an embedded advertising device that forces you to see ads every time you turn it on. You can't buy a car without needing a touchscreen that if it breaks you're SOL. People who actually like computers increasingly can't even afford to buy one
If I could I'd toss my TV I bought a decade ago into the garbage can after all of the updates it keeps receiving making it more and more intrusive with advertising. But then I'd have to pay extra for a non-smart TV.
The tech industry took essential human things away from regular people and sold it back to them as metered services.
Social skills, friends, short term memory, dating, sex, intelligence etc
Tech intentionally exploits regular people for its own gain, intentionally breaking peoples brains for techs profit.
In short "tech" doesn't care about anything but the "bottom line" its the same as the military industrial complex- people break, people die, genocide happens and we empower it... who cares we're getting rich.
No one sees the faces of the military industrial complex but tech CEO's(the faces of the industry) proudly smile for the camera's and rub their billionaire lifestyles in the publics faces.
In short people hate the "tech industry" because it has taken everything away from everyone while enriching a few- and its all public.
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.
One property is that some obsessive people have always hated some kind of outracing successful industry of some period. Going backwards it's AI, general tech, bankers. Everyone always has a cover story but eventually it comes down to "these people are coming here and driving up housing prices / restaurant costs" etc.
And besides, the hate isn't even universal. Normal people like Google and Apple and Amazon and Netflix. These brands have high favourability. In fact, what I've noticed is that people with all these strong opinions about what are mundane realities to most people have a tenuous grasp on reality. As an example:
> ...even if data centers look at you really funny when you want to colo a box as a random individual these days...
This is and has always been nonsense. Monkeybrains will let you do it at $75/1A at 110V (expensive but no one is looking at you funny) and Hurricane Electric has deals for people who are using very little (half-cabinet even). I myself have hardware in a colo. When I went there, I had trouble with some rails and just asked one of those guys for help. It was like the old days. My wife helped me and we picked up my mum and daughter at the playground after.
And really, "what we've done in the last 10 years"? Dude, the usual suspects were protesting that tech companies provided buses for their employees over 10 years ago. One guy puked on a bus in protest.
The whole post has taken a false premise (tech is generally hated), layered on some bad history (in the last 10 years something happened), and added some other bogus facts (colo facilities will look at you funny for going in by yourself). The whole thing has the taint of "lives entirely in a tech bubble and thinks that HN/Reddit is the real world". This entire genre of content that is purely created from Internet interaction with nearly zero real-world grounding is strange, and oddly it is consumed almost exclusively by all these other people who also have near zero real-world grounding.
(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 you suck.
(2) The fact that a huge number of people in tech have been "pilled" with hyper-elitist fascist-adjacent ideology. This one was a huge shocker to me as I watched it happen, especially because I read the texts and blogs that seemed to be driving it and was like "you people are smart... why are you falling for this?" I am by no means a hard leftist either, used to self-describe as a libertarian back when that meant what it sounds like it means. ... Then I realized that tech is full of nerds who (like me) got picked on in school, and that wound makes "you are aCkTuAllY a member of a cognitive master race" a powerful hook. It's not unique to nerds -- all humans are vulnerable to this pattern. You see it in groups of people who have been mass-abused through genocide or persecution for instance.
(3) A small number of people in tech have gotten rich to Gilded Age levels, and that burns in what I think is a stagflationary environment (we aren't calling it that, but for the "regular economy" we are basically in stagflation). If everyone was doing well and things like housing were affordable, I don't think people would care as much. I know personally I don't care if there are quintillinoaires out there somewhere as long as I am doing well and I can pursue my dreams... but if I'm not, it creates emotions of envy and hostility. This is natural hard-wired brain stem stuff.
Those are all rational reasons IMO and they all make sense.
I think the AI backlash builds mostly on #3, since AI threatens a lot of jobs in a stressed economic environment. The environmental stuff around AI (data center power etc.) is mostly exaggerated (except water in some areas), but its prevalence is driven by the fact that people want to find something to hate about this industry.
As evidence I submit the fact that artists, in my experience, are the most visceral AI haters. I get it. I do not believe AI is a threat to "true art." Not at all. But it is absolutely decimating the boring "potboiler" work artists used to use to make a living while they worked on the former, and it's always been brutally hard to make a living as an artist. AI also threatens programmers, but in that case we're talking maybe being knocked down from upper middle class to middle class not from lower middle class to bankruptcy.
(Total tangent -- I ran some numbers. If you telework 1-2 days a week, depending on your commute, you more than make up for using something like Claude Code heavily all day long. Same goes for skipping that DoorDash order. Cars use insane amounts of power if you really look, much more than data centers on an amortized per-user basis.)
+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.
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 funds stashed in tax havens. And just plain individual savings of people terrified about being poor in their old age.
My point is that the rich problem is not restricted to tech. Although it is quite visible
I'm not sure that's really true. The banks that hold Berkshire's money don't just stick it in a vault, they lend it out to people who want to finance a home or car or to businesses that use the money to grow.
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.
It's run by MBAs and sociopaths who want to make a quick buck and have no interest in or respect for building anything durable, and executed by yes-men (and some women) who don't have a single neuron to question what they're doing.
To the extent that people hate tech, it's because:
1. Tech is our "new money". New money is always hated, by every generation
2. Tech represents change and the human animal dislikes change. Most people are okay with everything that exists when they turn 25 and dislike everything that appears after
3. Tech represents capitalism in a pure form. Creative destruction reigns; companies and apps can rise and fall overnight. Ways of life are precarious and the constant churn bothers people
All three really come down to people disliking change. Instead of hating/fearinf change and dynamism, people should look inward. Establish a routine. Exercise. Garden. Read. Cook. It's more within your power than ever before to decide what you like and pursue it at your own pace. But don't expect the external world to meet your desire for stasis.
> Most people outside the tech industry don’t care
This is and always will be incorrect and just the go-to excuse and/or justification. People do care but their brains are too muddy from stress, lies, ambiguous information and the lack of time to separate truth from campaigns/propaganda/proprietary agendas.
This can be interpreted as people not actively caring, as in the infamous "nobody cares" and "nobody can do anything about that anyway" but it's actually passive carelessness that has it's origin in a conspiratorial kind of treatment of lower classes by upper classes. But that's boring.
What's exciting is that it holds true upwards. Top 10% earners "don't care" if they "loose" 50000 dollars due to fraud by people "above their pay grade".
Hop, hop, hop ... people hate the tech industry because they somewhat expect that skilled and/or smart people with resources, opportunity and time do things the right way ... because they can, because they say "we can" and "we will" and "the people" a lot in various ways.
It causes at least a little nausea to suddenly realize that young or middle aged or seasoned engineers and business people behave like aging placeholder representatives that were picked because they are "representative enough".
This, of course, partially stems from several cognitive fallacies about the things that evolution and expertise seem to imply but don't.
In the end, it's not hate but recurring disillusionment and disappointment ... that the tech industry is no better than 13 year old drug dealers getting the teens next door hooked on punched bullshit or violent pimps and malpracticing doctors.
"It's a shame, really."
That said, the tech industry is doing it's job and delivers and it's human nature to expect "more" from capable people as well as to be disappointed when they don't--especially when patterns of malicious intent emerge and become systematic and systemic ... which has been halpening over and over again ...
I 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, but it's increasingly being done without consideration for the users.
People hate the tech industry, and that includes those who work in it, because it's pretty clear that the industry really doesn't give a shit about it's users, because the users are rarely the customers anymore.
Yeah, this.
In terms of consumer benefit in tech we've been at stasis for a long time. My computing experience isn't that much different now than it was 15 or 20 years ago. Sure, my computer and connectivity are far faster now, and thanks to Apple Silicon I can go whole days at conferences without plugging my laptop in, but those are incremental improvements not sea changes. We did fine with 4-hour laptops in 1999.
Also a number of "improvements" just aren't, like smart home devices and IoT crap. Virtually none of those things have made good on the marketers' promises, and 100% of them require some tech family member to end up sysadmining the TV or the thermostat or the light switch, and having to do that kind of crap for things that used to Just Work in the most basic sense is insane.
There's been a lot of heavy lifting in the smart speaker space, and it IS true that my 86 year old mother enjoys being able to ask Siri to play any song she wants, but that kind of thing seems picayune compared to what middle-aged nerds thought the second quarter of the 21st century would bring us.
The only area that comes immediately to mind for ME that includes staggering advances is medical care. I had a hip replacement a few years ago that was an OUTPATIENT procedure. A dear friend of mine ignored symptoms and therefore only "caught" his colon cancer well into stage 4 -- and yet still lived 6 years with pretty high quality of life. Time was, a stage 4 diagnosis meant "uh, maybe don't renew your cable this month." Another pal has progressive MS; 15 years ago, there were no therapies AT ALL for it. Now there is one, and it's making a difference for him and his family.
Nothing on that scale has shown up from "the tech industry" in a long time.
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 access so it doesn't rely solely on personal responsibility to share account keys and passwords. How is our digital life secured and backed up without having to come up with home grown solutions and be a sys admin or pay for cloud storage. Why can't we decide on standard protocols for messaging, we had SMS, now we have different messaging apps, people who aren't tech savvy lose years of correspondence when switching devices because they failed to import or transfer data. We still haven't solved data archiving to free us from bit rot and degradation, things like project silica are only in the research phases. All the while, we generate more and more data and make our lives completely dependent on digital services and devices. More and more bank branches are cashless now. We had a massive power grid outage a few years ago and at the convenience store we couldn't buy anything, there was no way to issue a paper receipt or anything like that, the store employees were clueless. I still remember a time when you could buy on tab/credit, they would just write it up, or at least take cache and issue handwritten receipts. And now we're piling AI on top of everything, but operating systems are still crap, software is mostly crap and we have to update our devices every few years because they become slow or stop working. And it feels like younger generations don't mind because it's the new normal, they grew up with smart devices.
>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.
I worked in car sales. Most of my coworkers drove drunk once a week or more. So basically I've seen 10+ people drive drunk 100+ times, and no doubt they do it more outside my view. No one ever had an accident.
Right, the drunk drivers never had an accident, until that night they kill some other family of 4.
For sure drunk driving increases your odds of an accident. But people make it sound 3-4 beers and you're bound to have an accident. We should be more honest about it.
What a weird straw pile to die one. No one is saying "four beers and you're guaranteed an accident". They're saying "drive drunk and you are a piece of shit, don't do it ever ever ever". There's no room for nuance here because the targets of this advice have lethally impaired judgement. Wiggle room will be exploited by people too drunk to know better, which equals preventable death.
Most people would not describe the observable behavior of someone just over the legal limit as drunk.
The police sure would. And when people these days talk about drinking and driving, most of it IS the 4 beers after work they're talking about.
The crazy drunkard having stiff drinks at a bar and then driving home after almost falling over walking to his car is pretty rare.
But you're right, in the context of the OP I was responding to, he probably did mean real drunkards being more popular back then.
My optometrist told me that when he started clinical practice years ago he was shocked to discover how many people were driving around with severe visual impairments. The usual DMV eye exam is way too easy.
I sold cars for a living so I pay attention to randoms in cars more than most probably. The amount of people (mostly women) sitting WAYYY too low in their car is shocking. I don't know how they can even see most of what's near in front of them.
The way too close to the steering wheel also shocks me, but I guess with that one theyre going to just hurt themselves.
When id sell a car, or even on test drives, I'd try to help them adjust the seat to a sane position but most people that do it wrong seem to be pretty set in their ways and don't want to change it even with some friendly advice and showing them the seat goes way up. It's almost like they don't like looking bigger in their car or something.
>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.
Being able to use ChatGPT is useful, but it is significantly offset by how many business interactions are now mediated solely by chatgpt, and I'm not sure on balance my life has been improved.
The fight to actually talk to a human on help desk.
[dead]
Those are real tech IMO. Consumer media type software isn't 'tech', at least not regular useful software sense. That would be like calling addictive drugs and slot machines an innovation or technology.
e-bikes are a terror. Motorized vehicles operating in places where motorized vehicles aren't allowed (so like all modern tech, the benefit is the abuse/loophole they allow a small subset to benefit from). People treating them like toys and riding horribly resulting in lots of accidents. Nah, they aren't a plus.
They are huge health plus for older people. It gives them the exercise they need without being mind numbingly boring.
Sitting on their ass while a battery wizzes them around isn’t ‘healthy’ lol.
It’s incredibly how many deluded people are on this site.
I think the health benefits would be the ability to get out and be involved with the world. When I was living in Chinatown I was amazed by how much healthier the elderly people were simply from going to the park each day and hanging out with their friends or dancing (Chinese people, at least in the US, seem to LOVE ballroom dancing!). The problem is that not everyone can live in a strong community where they can walk to a local park.
They are actually pedaling and moving, but they need less strength and stamina to get further. They dont end up stuck downhill unable to climb up. This latter risk is something that really forces old people to put out of normal bikes. For older person, the e-bike is roughly the exercise they need. And it gets you to places, it does not limit them to small area.
The old person alternative to e-bike is not normal bike, it is nothing, because their bodies are just like that - weak and old.
> 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.
Isn't that just a lease?
I could see that being enshittified soon. From what I've seen the deal is often "you lease the car instead of owning it, but you get a much nicer car than you could otherwise afford". I could see it switching to "You get a regular car but you still don't own it."
The voluntary adoption of modern tech products says otherwise. People aren't forced to wear Apple Watches, order food through doordash, look up things on ChatGPT, ride Waymos etc. And yet everything I listed above is very popular.
Population wide revealed preferences speak volumes despite what loud critics who appointed themselves as the people's ambassadors may say.
I think it is important to keep in mind that people's "revealed preferences" are dependent on the society they live in. E.g. are people talking to ChatGPT about their deepest fears because they want to or because society has under invested in counselors like pastors, school guidance counselors, licensed therapist, etc.
adopting something and having it improve your life are two dramatically different things
People aren't forced to smoke, gamble, or drink alcohol.
People commonly voluntarily destroy their health and screw their lifes. So not very thought out argument.
This is it.
The silicon valley tech industry went from being a consumer products industry to being an advertising industry. Consumer products companies see the person buying their stuff as the customer. Advertising companies see them as the product.
Plus the monopolies..
I certainly hate that even when working on ecommerce projects, I have indirectly contributed for people to lose their jobs, as chains close their physical stores.
All you said plus they think they are above the law.
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?
Why? Because their messaging is not addressing the general public, but their investors. And they've realized that their investors are really receptive to panic-baiting (we'll get rid of jobs, ASI is right around the corner, p(doom) = 25% etc).
This doesn't answer GPs question, though: Why is a panic-baiting "we'll get rid of jobs" better than some gain-baiting "we'll make your workforce 10x more productive"? Why is panic a better response to investors than gain?
We got:
- A: "AI helps in automating tedious tasks"
- B: "Your workforce can be more motivated and productive"
- C: "You can do more with fewer people"
Why not advertise A → B, stop there and let their customers do the reasoning for B → C themselves? Why go straight to a hyperbolic A → C and swallow all the hate that comes with it?
My own presumption is that we got that strange fetish for optimization (C) and just don't trust our own ambitions to make the potential gain in productivity (B) work any other way.
It goes back to Warren Buffett quote "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." That is what it is. I thought it was just funny but wrong comment, but lately realized Buffett was 100% right all along.
Panic just makes it sound more real, I think. They were saying stuff like "Eek, our technology is TOO dangerous and advanced and we need to be regulated :-O" when they definitely didn't actually want to be regulated. ("They" meaning at least Sam Altman).
"Your workforce will be more productive" sounds much less impressive than "OMG you will literally not need employees anymore!! 10x profits!!"
Panic switches off the rational part of your brain and makes you act without thinking. Better for anyone who wants to manipulate you.
Because it's being sold off as the terminal technology and if you aren't in on the final and ultimate technological innovation you will be for forever behind and never catch up.
> 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?
Even if they did, would you believe them? Here's Zuckerberg on how he sees "Personal Superintelligence": https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/
Compare that to the $1.4 trillion lawsuit now in the news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48817682
Or compare Musk's promises to what's delivered. His self-driving timelines has its own Wikipedia page; how much he opined DOGE could save could be falsified by the top-level breakdown of the US federal budget. He used to be worried about AI, "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon", now he's saying he wants more Tesla shares for the "robot army" which his SpaceX presentations say will be a billion* strong.
* though if you just naïvely apply the numbers here, that factory will also be "on fire": https://www.terafab.ai
It is not PR issue. AI founders in fact do want to get rid of jobs and create permanent underclass. That is their actual real goal. Better PR would make people realize it later, but that it is. And whether we realize it or not does not matter. Tech CEOs they already captured so much power, that it does not matter what "masses" think, feel or whether they suffer.
AI founders are OK with people hating them, because people truly absolutely dont matter.
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.
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.
Is it an error though? The general public has noticed, everyone hates their guts but investment is still flowing.
If they end up getting heavily regulated, then it's definitely an error. The Fable export controls kerfuffle was definitely downstream of all the hype so it seems to be having some impact.
I think the real question is, if the big tech companies are so all knowing and all powerful, with so much control over media and messaging, then why is their PR so bad?
They live in a bubble and don’t understand that getting rid of jobs is not universally seen as a good thing.
If you haven’t read it already, I can recommend “Careless People”, this is a constant theme in the book.
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.
"Get rid of jobs" was a pitch to investors. They needed a new trillion dollar idea. For it to be worth a trillion dollars it has to take a trillion dollars from somewhere. They looked at the economy and decided the only place it could come from is white collar payroll.
Unfortunately for them more than just the investors were paying attention to the pitch. So now they are trying to say "of course it won't unemploy people (wink) it may even create more jobs (snicker)."
> For it to be worth a trillion dollars it has to take a trillion dollars from somewhere.
Musk's SpaceX TAM is roughly as you say, it's "subsume all currently existing desk jobs", which makes it simultaneously absurdly over-confident in the short term and treating this all as a zero-sum game where those jobs just go away and no new (potentially also automatable) jobs get invented, which in turn says he doesn't think anywhere is going to shift from primary and secondary economies to tertiary economies.
Zuckerberg may be full of himself, but does at least (pay someone else to?) write a vision that at least has growth-sounding phrases in it: https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/
> 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?
> 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.
sociopaths talking to other sociopaths.
they're not pitching to the average person, they're talking to C-levels, private equity, other ruthless billionaires, etc.
and when you have a solution that will eliminate the workers, why do you care about lying to the workers? instead of being lambasted about being blunt and evil you'll be lambasted about being duplicitous and evil
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.
Bankers had it bad for a long time. Now it's our turn!
It's the same people. Before 2008 they used to go into banking, now they entered tech instead.
I'd say this explains why all the code is bad now, but I remember what it used to look like too.
Is that because Bankers have mostly disappeared as a profession people deal with in person?
Because journalists and their employers view tech as a competitor for ad dollars and threat to their professions.
Tech companies possess immense resources and huge potential to shape public discourse. Activists (that often includes journalists today) wish to exert power over tech companies for that reason. In the era of social media, weaponized complaining and astroturfed rage/hate is a very effective method of exerting actual power and inluence. When you see sentences like "Why do people hate X?", understand that this may be a statement pursuing a goal (we need you to believe that people hate X, so you should too), not a genuine quesion.
I am not a fan of tech companies _at all_, BTW. But the enemy of an enemy is not always a friend.
I think this article overestimates how much the average person knows about tech. People know who Musk, Bezos, and Gates are, but hardly anyone outside of tech knows who Collison is. Most don't know much about VC funding either, but they certainly can see when products have become too smart to the point where they get needlessly complicated.
It literally says average person does not know who Collison is? It is literally one of its arguments.
Hating the tech industry is mainly seen amongst the first world countries and the rich educate, high status people amongst them.
I posit that the reasons are
- the need for conservatism and slowing down progress is inherent in people. Last time it was opposing LGBTQ and racial discrimination and now it is technology. Its the same mode of opposition, people just don't like chaotic progress.
- people who have good jobs and high status want to _conserve_ it and not lose position - tech industry keeps threatening the status quo again and again
- for some reason cynicism is seen as signalling a more mature worldview while optimism is seen as childish when the historical trend points to optimism instead
> Last time it was opposing LGBTQ and racial discrimination and now it is technology
Wut? None of those 3 things are like the others. This is gibberish.
parent poster is doing what is known as 'deflection' and is trying to upend the conversation my bringing in mostly-unrelated hot-button topics, like gender, racism, and other terms that elicit strong reactions.
or they're just idiots, but with 50% of the internet being bots who can say?
That's a weirdly optimistic view of technology. Specially the comparison to homophobia and racism. Yes, tech has solved people's basic but real needs for communication, banking, entertainment, etc. Then after a certain level, without aggressive dark patterns, people's needs for tech were basically met. No one needed social media, we needed social networks. No one needed inescapable "algorithms"¹ besides the ones trying to screw us over. What is this "status quo" you're talking about? And what is this technology progress that is threatening it?
¹ using the term "algorithms" here in its colloquial non-tech sense.
I personally love social media because it brings different cultures together. Infinity immigration has been tried but not in a nice way. Next best thing is social media - bringing cultures together in a marketplace and having ideas beat eachother is important for a civilisation.
Without social media you would have corners of culture getting stuck on whatever ideas they had from 2000 years ago. With social media these stale ideas get beaten by good ones.
That's fine, if that's your choice. Reddit was awesome at first because it was a hot pot of cultures. But we lost that control. You don't see what you want unless you fight hard against the algo.
"I personally love social media because it brings different cultures together"
It doesn't bring people of different cultures together - it removes different cultures, and pumps people full of goo produced by culture industry.
> Last time it was opposing LGBTQ and racial discrimination and now it is technology.
The attacks on and hate of trans people are on the rise. There seem to be literal strategy of preventing blacks and women from career rise in military and government. And all of these are enabled and helped by tech. The radicalization and hate grows due to our algorithms.
> tech industry keeps threatening the status quo again and again
Tech industry is the status quo, it represents people with good jobs and high status looking down on everyone else. It was like that for decades now. Tech industry is all about creating monopolies, consolidating and killing the competition.
> when the historical trend points to optimism instead
It does not. We failed to manage climate change. The world is moving from stability to chaos, toward more wars. The politics of several countries is turning toward openly fascists. The powerful are less and less accountable, amassing more and more power. Corruption is at unprecedented levels.
Good times already were. We are going toward bad times and things will start improving only after they will get really bad first.
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> a lot of people have now realized this and are explicitly fighting back against trans demands.
They are literally actively trying to create the world where trans people are hurt as much as possible. They are not on the defense, they are the assholes.
>Blacks and women have historically benefitted from explicit racial and gender preferences
Man, no one got more historical benefits from explicit racial and gender preferences as white men.
> which looks like "preventing blacks and women from career rise" from the perspective of a pro-affirmative-action person.
They are literally prevented from progress solely due to their race and gender. As was historical norm for a long time.
> the poltical demands trans people make in the explicit name of trans rights necessarily entail enlisting the state to help destroy gender distinctions
This is hysterical in both senses of the word, and also nonensical.
> Both of these phenomena are contemporary American poltical currents, and don't have much to do with the tech industry in and of itself.
The mode of opposition against culture change to benefit these groups is the same mode of opposition against technology. Both exist to preserve status quo - to keep the same hierarchies.
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Why does it have to exclusively hurt upper middle class? I’m not sure why you added that constraint.
Edit: I do enjoy Noah Smith and neoliberalism. Good on you for getting it right.
“Hating the tech industry is mainly seen amongst the first world countries and the rich educate, high status people amongst them.”
For the record I used to read noahpinion all the time. Then I developed critical thinking skills. It’s not a compliment that it was so easy for me to recognize you as a reader of his. You should learn how to think for yourself.
I still check his blog occasionally to see what the tech elite / alphabet boys want me to think. It’s become surprisingly easy to deduce their strategy.
You read obvious sarcasm as earnest. And you didn’t answer a question I asked. And you just hurled some insults.
“people who have good jobs and high status want to _conserve_ it and not lose position - tech industry keeps threatening the status quo again and again”
I did answer your question. Are you saying the above quote is sarcasm?
You asked why I highlighted techs impact on the upper middle class. It’s because you singled them out as the primary opponents of tech multiple times.
I didn’t use any insults at all. Where are you seeing insults? I’m giving you valuable advice.
> It’s not a compliment that it was so easy for me to recognize you as a reader of his. You should learn how to think for yourself.
..
Let’s just say I’m delivering the message with the same level care and thoughtfulness that neoliberals exemplify when they defend genocide.
Have a good day. Or don’t. I really don’t care.
I think there are a few reasons to note here:
1. Tech is associated with a lot of the issues affecting society right now, while other business sectors often aren't. Data centres and the rising price of computer components, social media addiction, gambling apps, surveillance, etc. These are all things in the news or affecting people's daily lives, and the 'tech industry' tends to get the blame for them.
2. Many of the people involved tend to have a bad reputation, even compared to other industries. Musk is the obvious one, but Bezos, Zuckerberg and others like them don't exactly have a great reputation with the general public.
3. As much as I can't blame them sometimes, the media absolutely hates the tech industry and the companies operating in it. Thanks in part to the large social media platforms all but annihilating traditional journalism as a business, there's a lot of hatred aimed at the companies responsible as a result. If you see any news article about a tech related topic that isn't a product announcement (and maybe even then), it's probably going to be a negative one about the dangers and issues with tech.
I beg to differ on point 3. The media has been extremely accommodating to the AI evangelists.
We reading the same media here? All the major tech news publications like the Verge or ArsTechnica take a highly skeptical tone towards AI.
Nearly every major newspaper company is actively suing AI companies over copyright infringement. They have been quite outspoken that they see Google's AI overviews as an existential threat to their business.
On the list of extremely annoying things you can put on a webpage, a cat constantly running after my cursor is definitely a new one for me.
This is probably showing both our ages that this is new to you and very old for me.
I was on the web in the late 90s! I don't recall seeing anything like this, although it certainly may have existed. Animated cursors yes (CometCursor!), but not little animations chasing your cursor.
I remember copy/pasting scripts in dreamweaver to make leaves or snow fall on the webpage.
Clearly you were not on the web in the 90s. But agree it's very annoying.
I remember CometCursor and the like, but nothing that chased the cursor itself.
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)
So could it be Capitalism?
Linear growth is a failure; only infinite, exponential growth is acceptable.
Yes, yes it is.
Or rather, every economist reads the first 20 pages of Smith's Wealth Of Nations, and basically skips everything afterwards.
Like... This gem: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
In my opinion tech used to be fun and we used to create products that actually empower people. Think MySpace, early-days Facebook, Soundcloud, Ableton Live etc. They exist to empower the masses to connect and to create.
Today the business model has made every products and contents to be enshittified.
We've optimised for the wrong thing and not only the common people hate the tech industry. Even I no longer feels the joy of working in tech.
When it comes to empowering, I am not sure much beats Excel. It lets non techy people codify amazing things and get real work done.
excel runs the world
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 feels like it went from a farmer's market with a lot of local farmers selling their goods to shopping at Walmart.
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.
empowers them to create slop clickbate shit
yeah there are some truly great creators but they're drowned out in the sea of piss that is the generic YT algo
AI is now taking those jobs, which I'm not sure if it is better or worse
I think that just highlights how “empowerment” through tech is biased towards producers, which makes sense because that aligns with the usual business propositions.
For consumers, YT is not empowering. It fulfills a need, well enough to tie them to the platform. But it is obviously not set up to hand them any more power than to serve that goal. You want to shield yourself from wasting time here? Sorry, not sorry, our goal is to steal your attention and entertain you just enough that you keep scrolling.
YT can be/was empowering for the viewer. Product choices have made it far more of a pointless timesuck and consumer hostile but it still remains the place where I can find a video of a guy taking the front off the same model dishwasher that I have to fix the latch in the soap dispenser while he points out how to do it without permanently destroying the clips that hold it together.
> creators
I'd argue the very expression "creating content" is a euphemism for producing shit, of which algorithm driven platforms like Youtube excel at promoting.
Information systems has always been about empowering business leaders to produce more with less human effort. In that respect, AI for example has been a game changer. Everything else was a sideshow.
If you've been leaning hard on programming and lack the people skills to join the business class, that's on you. Things are going to get very hard for you in the near future, if they haven't already. People skills are the new moat.
> If you've been leaning hard on programming and lack the people skills to join the business class, that's on you.
where did i say that I've been solely leaning hard on programming and not focusing on the people skill?
I didn't say you did. But the industry is full of people with technical acumen but little in the way of people skills or a knack for business needs; and in the supposedly halcyon days of the past many of them could grow rich, or at least popular, by developing something cool. These people are going to have a very bad time.
As always, capitalism can be counted on to destroy anything it touches.
Without the promise of return most promising technology would never have been created.
Agreed. Such is the duality.
At the start founders got the joy from making products that makes people happy. Then it inevitably evolves to chasing the dopamine of achieving larger and larger numbers based on some quantifiable metrics.
Yeah. "Hate": https://www.kapwing.com/blog/why-does-the-public-hate-the-te...
Re the linked piece, I'm concerned about people saying "they hate us" when they really mean "they disagree with us" or "they seem skeptical of what we say." It can easily become click bait.
The language changes, sure ... but equating disagreement with the emotion of hatred? Maybe that language change is a bad idea? Just spitballing here.
I'm with you in spirit wrt lowering the temp and avoiding clickbait. I want the internet and the world to be a better place with more peace and loving kindness, creativity and connection. But in this case -- describing the general public's feelings towards the ultra-rich, IMHO "disagree" and "skeptical" are just too watered-down; they don't convey all the legitimate feelings of resentment, fear, distaste, distrust, indignation, etc that feed into something typically described as "hate". ):
Sure. If it really is hate, then that's the right word.
Maybe you hate a certain politician, or maybe you just hate that one annoying commercial that they keep playing. In either case, the tech industry probably helped make it possible. Yes, they hate you.
I think hate is the perfect word.
Can I ask for more info? Is it the perfect word for how some people feel about the tech industry? The perfect word to describe disagreement?
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.
When we are on the same level, we can disagree on things.
When you have concentrated power and make a living out of fucking around with everybody else, you seed hatred.
i can disagree with my friend's opinion about if a cake is tasty.
i can disagree with my neighbor's opinion that his wife is pretty or his kids are smart.
i hate entrenched capital that is trying to obliterate my ability to work, and which will leave me to starve, and which is very, very blunt about how little they care about us.
I agree.
For a normal person, when your day is pop-ups, cookie dialogs, dark patterns, auto-opt-in, <100-pages-of-legalese> + "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.
Good article, but damm, the cat was annoying. I was really distracting, I had to edit the page to remove it.
I just used the keyboard to navigate so the cat didn't move.
Get the cat back in the bag.
I think one reason it's because many prominent tech leaders act like assholes or scammers: Zuck, Altman, Kalanick, Musk, and even "do no evil" Google has changed to "do no evil, unless you can make a lot of money doing it".
so it doesn't give people confidence that the tech industry is doing anything that benefits the average person; mostly they're just looking to make as much $$ as possible and screw everything else, including our planet's future. basically Gordon Gekko's of the 21st Century.
> And it goes on, and on, and on. Modern “tech companies” haven’t come up with any aspect of life they haven’t tried to “disrupt,” for the purposes of addicting you and then enshitifying the service by shoving ads in front of your eyes. Woohoo, the future!
Also:
1. Tech is full or arrogant assholes who thing they know better than everyone. That leads to things like ham-handed attempts at gaslighting. It's especially grating when it's coming from some 25 year old kid.
2. The whole "making the world better" facade has fallen away. It's pretty clear a lot of them are selfish, greedy fucks. See: jamming AI and everyone's face and all the variations of "stop hiring humans."
Because its dominated more by businessmen than engineers c.f. early days of IT
Funnily enough, I ran across an article this morning titled "What you hate about AI is the capitalism." and I feel like you can basically apply that to all tech!
It’s probably naive to assume a different system would cure all our ills. But I do wonder - if humanity acted for the collective good instead of individual self-interest, how different would our technology be? And how different would we be because of it?
Link to the article for those interested: https://graceblakeley.substack.com/p/what-you-hate-about-ai-...
Why wouldn't they? It patronizes and infantilizes most of them. You can see the father knows best attitude all over this very forum. Calls for locking users out of their phones for their own good are seen here daily and that is just one example. When something big acts continually to disempower a group of people, of course some of them will resent it.
1. 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.
People hate the tech industry because it has negative effects on their lives, and these effects are deliberate rather than incidental.
There are, of course, some good people/companies/projects in the tech industry, but think about the overall impression of the industry as a whole: careless and malevolent.
The tech industry and its figureheads have
- Lied consistently about their capabilities
- Brazenly flouted the law
- Shoved ads and planned obsolescence and surveillance into everything
- Increased prices again and again
- Supported oppressive governments and war crimes
- Gleefully attempted to remove many people's livelihoods
- Predicted that they would end the world, and then doubled down on the same path
- Deployed bots everywhere, polluting online communities
- Pushed technology with the primary aim of CSAM or deepfake pornography
I could keep listing, and again, this isn't every single person in the tech industry. But if you group them all together, you have to take the bad with the good, and there's a lot of bad.
Frankly, the real question is why don't more people hate the tech industry?
(Dis)honorable mentions to the current waves of gleeful surveillance state enablement and gambling by any other name, the latter even directly preceded by desperately trying to get everyone's less techy relatives to bag-hold crypto pump n dumps
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.
Some of us even pledged to work ethically and practice integrity. Not sure what the original english version is. Found this online:
https://order-of-the-engineer.org/about-the-order/obligation...
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.
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.
I'm a New Zealander. Farmers here are disliked by a large percentage of the population
Agriculture is pretty much the antonym of industry.
Hairdressing/beauticians
In the words of Hank Hill, "some people are meant to go to college, and some people are meant to go to beauty school."
This specific quote actually belongs to Luanne Platter
"I learned something really important at college today. I don't wanna be there! Some people are meant to go to college, and some people are meant to go to beauty school. And I'm in beauty school!"
(who says AI is useless?)
Is this a sarcasm? I hate them trying to upsell their stuff or lie about the products(almost all of the product marketing in beauty industry is a lie) or oversell their services.
If I were to guess, I think what you mean interacting with them not the money extraction part?
Kindergartens
Nobody enjoys paying for one though.
I mean sure... but I vote for education tax levies whenever they come up and choose to live somewhere where they pass. I wouldn't call my emotions about it negative.
Space exploration.
I think that's true of NASA. However, I've got a pretty negative view of SpaceX due to the whole "owned by a Nazi thing".
Hahem, Wernher von Braun... What is it with nazis and rockets anyway?
Tons of people believe it's a waste of money though (I disagree).
The problem is capitalism and the injustices it creates. The hated industries are just symptoms.
The problem isn't capitalism, well it's not JUST capitalism. If you give any group of individuals that level of wealth control, the same pattern repeats. They can be shareholders, board directors, or commissars or general secretaries of the people's party, a prince or a duke, or the first citizen.
It doesn't matter, all you need to replicate the same problems is concentration of wealth and power and the ability to direct it.
Indeed. It's just that capitalism produces immense concentrations of wealth as a core feature of the system.
Sure, so did the Roman Republic and Pharonic Egypt and Imperial China and Communist China
So you're going to need a more accurate diagnosis than simply capitalism
I have to tighten your earlier point a bit first: it is not just absolute concentration of wealth that causes this, it is high levels of inequality, e.g. lots of people in misery with a few folks that have ridiculous riches.
I'm pretty sure the commoners (and even more so, the slaves!) in Rome, Egypt or Imperial China didn't love the system either.
However, I think the average modern-day, communist Chinese person has seen such a rise in standards of living (one billion people pulled out from poverty!) that they don't really hate the system despite there also being high wealth concentration amongst party and business elites.
The gap is the problem, not the peak.
And yet all this power in the hands of the very few are only there because the rest of us don't know any better than coordinating for their benefit rather than coordinating in any other way.
As someone who has worked in tech for over 20 years, I think the backlash against modern technology is not hard to understand.
A few things stand out:
The social isolation of the digital age. We spend more time staring into phones than looking each other in the eye. The polarization created and amplified by social media platforms. The spread of disinformation, radicalization, and algorithmically optimized outrage. A developer and founder culture that is still heavily male-coded, often morally shallow, and too quick to treat empathy as weakness or inefficiency. The hype-and-hustle economy that startup culture has helped normalize inside American hyper-capitalism. The robber barons of earlier generations have been replaced by tech bros, growth hackers, and social media personalities who are often rewarded more for manipulation than for building anything durable. The erosion of the middle class and the normalization of unstable gig work, especially for Gen Z and millennials, leading to a lower standard of living for many younger Americans. Crypto, and the amount of fraud, speculation, and wasted energy that came with it. Now AI: not just the technology itself, but the way it is being funded, marketed, and deployed, often with little regard for human creativity, labor, consent, or meaning.
Yes, this is a negative list. Technology has obviously produced enormous good as well.
But it says something important that many younger people increasingly experience modern tech not as liberation, but as addiction, surveillance, manipulation, and spiritual exhaustion.
The article really sums it up perfectly. It's incredibly see to see topical reasons why people fucking hate everything tech touches. You can't buy a TV without it being an embedded advertising device that forces you to see ads every time you turn it on. You can't buy a car without needing a touchscreen that if it breaks you're SOL. People who actually like computers increasingly can't even afford to buy one
If I could I'd toss my TV I bought a decade ago into the garbage can after all of the updates it keeps receiving making it more and more intrusive with advertising. But then I'd have to pay extra for a non-smart TV.
The tech industry took essential human things away from regular people and sold it back to them as metered services.
Social skills, friends, short term memory, dating, sex, intelligence etc
Tech intentionally exploits regular people for its own gain, intentionally breaking peoples brains for techs profit.
In short "tech" doesn't care about anything but the "bottom line" its the same as the military industrial complex- people break, people die, genocide happens and we empower it... who cares we're getting rich.
No one sees the faces of the military industrial complex but tech CEO's(the faces of the industry) proudly smile for the camera's and rub their billionaire lifestyles in the publics faces.
In short people hate the "tech industry" because it has taken everything away from everyone while enriching a few- and its all public.
Fucking duh...
1 it seems like every successful company is headed by self centered assholes 2 enshittification
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.
One property is that some obsessive people have always hated some kind of outracing successful industry of some period. Going backwards it's AI, general tech, bankers. Everyone always has a cover story but eventually it comes down to "these people are coming here and driving up housing prices / restaurant costs" etc.
And besides, the hate isn't even universal. Normal people like Google and Apple and Amazon and Netflix. These brands have high favourability. In fact, what I've noticed is that people with all these strong opinions about what are mundane realities to most people have a tenuous grasp on reality. As an example:
> ...even if data centers look at you really funny when you want to colo a box as a random individual these days...
This is and has always been nonsense. Monkeybrains will let you do it at $75/1A at 110V (expensive but no one is looking at you funny) and Hurricane Electric has deals for people who are using very little (half-cabinet even). I myself have hardware in a colo. When I went there, I had trouble with some rails and just asked one of those guys for help. It was like the old days. My wife helped me and we picked up my mum and daughter at the playground after.
And really, "what we've done in the last 10 years"? Dude, the usual suspects were protesting that tech companies provided buses for their employees over 10 years ago. One guy puked on a bus in protest.
The whole post has taken a false premise (tech is generally hated), layered on some bad history (in the last 10 years something happened), and added some other bogus facts (colo facilities will look at you funny for going in by yourself). The whole thing has the taint of "lives entirely in a tech bubble and thinks that HN/Reddit is the real world". This entire genre of content that is purely created from Internet interaction with nearly zero real-world grounding is strange, and oddly it is consumed almost exclusively by all these other people who also have near zero real-world grounding.
Just total nonsense.
A handful of sociopath CEOs get way too much press exposure and make themselves into the worst possible mascots for the industry.
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 you suck.
(2) The fact that a huge number of people in tech have been "pilled" with hyper-elitist fascist-adjacent ideology. This one was a huge shocker to me as I watched it happen, especially because I read the texts and blogs that seemed to be driving it and was like "you people are smart... why are you falling for this?" I am by no means a hard leftist either, used to self-describe as a libertarian back when that meant what it sounds like it means. ... Then I realized that tech is full of nerds who (like me) got picked on in school, and that wound makes "you are aCkTuAllY a member of a cognitive master race" a powerful hook. It's not unique to nerds -- all humans are vulnerable to this pattern. You see it in groups of people who have been mass-abused through genocide or persecution for instance.
(3) A small number of people in tech have gotten rich to Gilded Age levels, and that burns in what I think is a stagflationary environment (we aren't calling it that, but for the "regular economy" we are basically in stagflation). If everyone was doing well and things like housing were affordable, I don't think people would care as much. I know personally I don't care if there are quintillinoaires out there somewhere as long as I am doing well and I can pursue my dreams... but if I'm not, it creates emotions of envy and hostility. This is natural hard-wired brain stem stuff.
Those are all rational reasons IMO and they all make sense.
I think the AI backlash builds mostly on #3, since AI threatens a lot of jobs in a stressed economic environment. The environmental stuff around AI (data center power etc.) is mostly exaggerated (except water in some areas), but its prevalence is driven by the fact that people want to find something to hate about this industry.
As evidence I submit the fact that artists, in my experience, are the most visceral AI haters. I get it. I do not believe AI is a threat to "true art." Not at all. But it is absolutely decimating the boring "potboiler" work artists used to use to make a living while they worked on the former, and it's always been brutally hard to make a living as an artist. AI also threatens programmers, but in that case we're talking maybe being knocked down from upper middle class to middle class not from lower middle class to bankruptcy.
(Total tangent -- I ran some numbers. If you telework 1-2 days a week, depending on your commute, you more than make up for using something like Claude Code heavily all day long. Same goes for skipping that DoorDash order. Cars use insane amounts of power if you really look, much more than data centers on an amortized per-user basis.)
+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...)
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 funds stashed in tax havens. And just plain individual savings of people terrified about being poor in their old age.
My point is that the rich problem is not restricted to tech. Although it is quite visible
I'm not sure that's really true. The banks that hold Berkshire's money don't just stick it in a vault, they lend it out to people who want to finance a home or car or to businesses that use the money to grow.
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.
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It's run by MBAs and sociopaths who want to make a quick buck and have no interest in or respect for building anything durable, and executed by yes-men (and some women) who don't have a single neuron to question what they're doing.
To the extent that people hate tech, it's because:
1. Tech is our "new money". New money is always hated, by every generation
2. Tech represents change and the human animal dislikes change. Most people are okay with everything that exists when they turn 25 and dislike everything that appears after
3. Tech represents capitalism in a pure form. Creative destruction reigns; companies and apps can rise and fall overnight. Ways of life are precarious and the constant churn bothers people
All three really come down to people disliking change. Instead of hating/fearinf change and dynamism, people should look inward. Establish a routine. Exercise. Garden. Read. Cook. It's more within your power than ever before to decide what you like and pursue it at your own pace. But don't expect the external world to meet your desire for stasis.
> Most people outside the tech industry don’t care
This is and always will be incorrect and just the go-to excuse and/or justification. People do care but their brains are too muddy from stress, lies, ambiguous information and the lack of time to separate truth from campaigns/propaganda/proprietary agendas.
This can be interpreted as people not actively caring, as in the infamous "nobody cares" and "nobody can do anything about that anyway" but it's actually passive carelessness that has it's origin in a conspiratorial kind of treatment of lower classes by upper classes. But that's boring.
What's exciting is that it holds true upwards. Top 10% earners "don't care" if they "loose" 50000 dollars due to fraud by people "above their pay grade".
Hop, hop, hop ... people hate the tech industry because they somewhat expect that skilled and/or smart people with resources, opportunity and time do things the right way ... because they can, because they say "we can" and "we will" and "the people" a lot in various ways.
It causes at least a little nausea to suddenly realize that young or middle aged or seasoned engineers and business people behave like aging placeholder representatives that were picked because they are "representative enough".
This, of course, partially stems from several cognitive fallacies about the things that evolution and expertise seem to imply but don't.
In the end, it's not hate but recurring disillusionment and disappointment ... that the tech industry is no better than 13 year old drug dealers getting the teens next door hooked on punched bullshit or violent pimps and malpracticing doctors.
"It's a shame, really."
That said, the tech industry is doing it's job and delivers and it's human nature to expect "more" from capable people as well as to be disappointed when they don't--especially when patterns of malicious intent emerge and become systematic and systemic ... which has been halpening over and over again ...