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Discuss HN: The Last 10 Years

20 points by absolutelyrad ↗ HN
From my observation, I feel like the last 10 years of progress in internet companies have mostly had a net negative impact on societies/relationships/mental health.

This is unlike the decade of 2000's where it was a mostly positive thing for the good. Perhaps the rise of "smart phone" has contributed to such a thing, including OS's that are very limited to prevent anti-harm technologies from taking off.

Here are areas of improvement I can foresee in mobile tech:

1. Modern devices have insufficient parental controls. Parents cannot observe what their young child does, and correct them if they're making a mistake. They require you to trust the company to decide what is best for your child. Eg: YouTube etc where kids spend a lot of their time.

2. Modern technologies enable a sort of prisoners dilemma in relationships. Yes you should trust your partner, but there's the phrase "trust but verify". I could foresee a company marketing a phone for couples, where you see where both of you are, and what you're doing on your devices 24/7. Instead of buying rings, to signify your love, you decide to share everything with each other, no secrets.

I was lucky that my parent's allowed me to access to all the technology that I wanted from a very young age, however I feel like it had a net negative impact on me. And I wouldn't let my kids have access to the same thing. Due to odd circumstance, including having the leisure to introspect myself which most people will not have the luxury of doing to themselves. (busy, work etc)

All in all, I feel like internet companies leaves a lot to be desired.

8 comments

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iforgottherest
Can failures in human morality be solved by technology?
qlk1123
Should they?

My interpretation of these concerns from OP is that human in general has lost his/her own control on him/herself. The existence of Internet/Online services overwhelms each individual's cognition and emotion from every possible angle. Almost no way to escape unless you quit SNS.

fsflover
> Perhaps the rise of "smart phone" has contributed to such a thing, including OS's that are very limited to prevent anti-harm technologies from taking off.

I think you are missing the point. The harm which technologies do (including smart phones) is caused by the proprietary software not controlled by the users, see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor....

tannhaeuser
Copyleft licenses haven't prevented Linux to be used for the largest installed base of spying devices on earth (Android phones) nor for lock-in schemes ("the cloud").

In fact, it can be argued the ubiquity and availability of F/OSS is largely responsible for creating a situation in which the only buck to be made is integration, QA, and value-add (eg RedHat capturing the enterprise market) superseded by convenience and CapEx->OpEx benefits (cloud providers). Accompanied by EEE tactics (KHTML->WebKit, POSIXly/LSB Linux->systemd "Lennax"). Holding on to philosophical discourses of old doesn't help.

Progress and choice is made by individuals/idealists (TBL) and industry consortiums (POSIX, SQL) in rare moments of lucky adoption, to be then captured by venture capital, and the ad, porn, and gambling industries; then leveraged by money-launderes, CPers and other criminals, dictators, radical whackos.

fsflover
Android is not free software. AOSP is, but Google services and drivers are proprietary making users helpless against surveillance and lock-in.

Try to do that on GNU/Linux phones.

For the “cloud” we have AGPL.

chegra
I think the future is allowing people to find and connection with their tribe. The rising rates of depression I think is caused by isolation.[1]

I think technology can be used to first of all less our load so that we have time to meetup. For instance, the use of robotic technology. Robotic kitchen are becoming a thing[2].

It can also lessen the cost of meeting up by improving fuel efficiency and efficient routing.

Also, technology can be used to identify persons whose values and interest align with yours.

Hopefully in the future, it would be a less lonely place.

[1] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/05/ce-corner-isolation

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNcPVvIs_tk

krrishd
I mean smartphone apps are literal brain plugins designed to minimize choice in favor of passivity, where the passivity serves no other "value system" besides profit. Disciplined adults can maybe resist control; kids are super malleable and we leave them to faceless algorithms that tune themselves to the basest versions of our nature (a "base" we've probably spent our entire existence attempting to rise above).

The internet (maybe best framed as instantaneous "world connectivity") might not be inherently bad, but "consumer tech" leans towards exploiting / re-centering our "nature" + breaking down taboos in exchange for the "new market" that always emerges as a result. “Make something people want” (even if there may have been good reason for that want to go un-served).

I imagine this playing out on the level of individual adaptations / boundaries – from building personal discipline (hard) to just having enough of a life to be offline more than online – rather than any macro improvement. New tech (eg. Urbit) might do it, but I think it requires both utopian and revolutionary (tear-the-whole-thing-down) thinking, both of which are vastly more likely to (catastrophically) fail than succeed.

All that pessimism aside though: anyone can still choose to personally resist that pull instead of accepting it as inevitable, as challenging as it might be for some. And maybe you're perfectly fine (maybe even better than you'd have been otherwise) in that regime anyway, who knows?

meiraleal
I don't think I'd be a hacker/software engineer if my parents controlled what I could or couldn't read on the internet back in the 90/00's. Although I agree with the point, there is a trade-off there.