Ask HN: Disillusioned with the direction of society and technology
Specifically the social media giants and advertising funded tech companies seem like the definition of emotional vampires. So do cryptocurrencies.
They are making society worse not better. For a time maybe 15-20 years ago, maybe peaking around the era of Snowden it looked like technology was going to truly democratise the world.
Now we are being led into an orwellian hell hole.
For what tech produces it is overly rewarded economically. The true economic value of some companies like facebook or amazon may be negative.
What can we do or is it already too late to save the world from the big tech monster?
I think it is already too late. The internet is like an opiate or stimulant for the masses and a vampire, feeding off of and feeding into emotions and mass popular delusions allowing people to be manipulated as sheep and resulting in time and energy being wasted by literally billions.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadPoverty, presumably one of the major causes of human suffering, has also declined dramatically worldwide. [2]
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty
Maternal death during childbirth, child mortality, and plagues dominated peoples' lives and offered no escape other than dumb luck before the rise of technology. Superstition provided the only hope of escaping the grim reaper who was omnipresent — could strike at any time and without warning.
Mass starvation was commonplace throughout history, but is now quite rare — due to high tech farming and distribution of foodstuffs.
All of those fears have faded enormously since the rise of modernity and public health advanced tech. COVID-19 would have been FAR worse (especially to the elderly and unhealthy) than it was but for the advancements of modern tech, especially the MRNA vaccines which, through the rapid advancements of tech, were created at an ASTONISHING rate. And it was only through the presence of tech that we've all been able to continue sharing our lives with friends and family during this, the first truly GLOBAL pandemic in history.
No, I'm thankful for the rise of technology EVERY DAY, and it gives we a lot of hope to continue improving everyday life in years to come.. It's the failures of humankind individually to advance emotionally and rationally that I fear. Humans still have a lot of growing up to do before we start responding to the vicissitudes of life like responsible adults still. In far too many ways, we still behave like children convinced the best response to difficulty is to behave badly and tear our hair in despair.
Fact is, living now, with all the plenty that tech has given us, should offer more hope for a better future than ever before. Yes, tech is disruptive, as it always has been. But tech has made the world a far better place in the past 300 years, and I for one expect that to continue, once the public gets some perspective on what life was BEFORE industrialization gave us hope for a better future.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Theodore_Kaczynski#Industrial_...
I don't necessarily disagree that Big Tech is driving dystopian changes in the nature of governance, but I don't think a rose-tinted view of the past is very helpful. Spying, disinformation, and corruption in the controllers of communication technologies has been a thing since the telegraph, if not earlier.
What makes unfulfilling work meaningful is it going to yourself. When you work and your earnings are not going to a feudal lord or bank, it's worth it.
Modern finance engineering is ruining everything, and tech is beneath it.
Wait till you learn about serfdom, slavery, French revolution and so on
Just read about how a software glitch lead to conviction of people for alleged theft in the UK. This is a severe example of people being overwhelmed with technology they don't understand and I don't mean the clerks.
Most of the open source tools today (e.g. kubernetes, tensorflow, pytorch) are not coming from academia , but from big tech companies.
The problem is not those companies, but rather the consumers do not want to pay for anything online. Hence, the need for advertising, privacy issues, etc.
The three projects chosen for the argument were started by companies, but let's dig a bit deeper. Kubernetes wouldn't be possible without container technology, enabled by modules contributed to Linux, and Linux did not start in a company, but rather by a student at the University of Helsinki. Pytorch wouldn't exist without Python, which was started at CWI (another research institute) in the Netherlands. Heck, we are having this argument over a protocol developed by CERN. The references seem to indicate a bias towards machine learning, but I can tell you that the researchers working on these tools would still be doing so at a university even if the companies weren't bankrolling the salaries, and even though they are at a company, they still act as if they are in academia.
Thus, I would claim that saying "most of the open source tools today are not coming from academia" is short-sighted at best. The revolutions are happening in academia, where it is safer to do more greenfield research, as opposed to working in a company where you have to have a shorter runway to profitability.
"The problem is not those companies, but rather the consumers do not want to pay for anything online. Hence, the need for advertising, privacy issues, etc."
IMHO, the problem exists on both sides. Yes, someone needs to pay to keep the lights on, and consumers should be expected to pay a nominal fee for some services. But they shouldn't need to pay with their privacy, or by shady manipulation, or by disingenuous EULAs. I don't know the solution, but I do know that cookie tracking isn't it, nor forcing people to watch ads with eye tracking like MoviePass is suggesting, nor surreptitiously spying on people's watching habits to subsidize TVs.
My point is that the by-product of big tech is a useful set of tools which would not exist without substantial R&D investment subsidized by revenues from ads.
Also, I am looking at reality vs what should be. If given an option, consumers would not pay, not even 0.99. This is reality. I.e. consumer are willing to give away their privacy for 0$ and free tools.
Tyrannical, greedy, and well-resourced psychopaths have been using technology to lead us into an Orwellian hell-hole.
Without them, all of this tech is a fantastic opportunity to empower and connect our world.
And that will happen - they've overstepped their mark and most people who matter know this already.
The real threat of technology is not some rogue AI taking over the world but human intelligence and energy being harnessed and shepherded for nefarious ends.
The second thing the computer did was model atomic explosions.
Computers are war machines first and foremost.
> IBM built the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, an electromechanical computer, during World War II. It offered its first commercial stored-program computer, the vacuum tube based IBM 701, in 1952.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabulating_machine
Things didn't use to be name "computer" before Turing, for reasons that are a bit less obvious than they appear to be at first, but the idea is quite old.
- - - -
> Oh, I remembered one less decade, it was 5.
Not to split hairs but IBM was founded in 1911.
> Things didn't use to be named "computer" before Turing, for reasons that are a bit less obvious than they appear to be at first, but the idea is quite old.
Babbage and Lovelace had the idea a couple of centuries ago, but tabulating machines and the business machines IBM sold aren't quite the same thing as what we think of as a "computer" today. Arguably the thing that most differentiates them- easy of re-programmability -is exactly what makes our modern machinery so untrustworthy.
Leaving aside the argument that accounting and tabulating are themselves tools of "the state" (e.g. the tabulating machine was "designed to assist in summarizing information ... for the 1890 U.S. Census.") can you deny that what might be called "computational supremacy" has been and continues to be a crucial aspect of international relations?
The most nefarious weapon invented previously has been around for 75+ years and was developed as far as to reach the capability of completely destroying all human life in a matter of minutes. But... it never has.
And this is despite it being repeatedly under the control of those whom are arguably the worlds greatest and most inhumane psychopaths.
That is, there must be something in human nature, or the nature of life itself, that prevents it from using technology to annihilate itself with it, even when such power is given to those most likely to use it for that.
Not to say there isn't a danger, even a great one. And I could understand being disillusioned by the present state of affairs. But, as with all such dualism, there exists just as strong a pull to catapult the other way.
Just as there were greater, bloodier and more heinous wars prior to the invention of nuclear weapons, it would seem that with such mastery of destruction comes a greater responsibility - that ultimately we rise to embrace.
(a) big picture. Read about the past centuries, millennia. In a lifetime that only lasts an hour, appreciate how much, how little is within our power. Democracy is an outlier. Individual freedom is an outlier. But total dystopia is also an outlier (and not to be expected).
(b) appreciate that the balance of bad and good that we see is not a zero-sum-game, we aren't presented a ratio. We are presented with negative and positive narratives independently. Some of the negative narratives we see today are over-rated, and many of the lesser seen positive ones remain very valid.
(c) almost nothing is a tipping point. The systems of our world are full of feedback loops, and often extreme outcomes are averted by (super-)exponential costs that ultimately change our behavior. There are dynamics that humans can't run away from, and they will (probably) not be the spontaneous destruction of earth, but rather a gradual forced change of behavior.
Depends on which groups of people and time periods you're talking about. Many groups of people have suffered through total dystopias throughout history.
sometimes that's a small open source tool, maybe that's remembering to help a neighbor out, or going out to a public trail and picking up trash, something positive that I can do immediately and that takes my focus off the negative stuff
there's a lot of good in the world, but the little black mirror can obscure it
Truth. Try and find what void technology is filling and fill it with non-tech solutions
1. There is no magic that will change human nature.
2. Rules that keep people from harming others are very important.
3. Don't expect to live a "special" or "great" or "revolutionary" life. Aspire to something extraordinary if you see an opportunity, but ordinary things like health, moderate wealth, and family are also good enough, and will have to be good enough for most people. And there is something very special in simply living a very good ordinary life.
4. Try not to be pushed into doing things that corrode the moral goodness within you. You will not regret spurning material rewards to live in accordance with your values, but you will regret the opposite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics)
Also a ban is plainly unconstitutional, people have a right to free speech, free association, and to work for whom they choose.
That feels like trading a problem for an even bigger problem. Everyone has greed but not everyone has competence. The world is in desperate need of more competence. Greed isn't necessarily a problem as long as it's regulated e.g., most people want nice stuff but don't burglarize their neighbors.
We all have conflicts of interest.
You want competence for strategically sound decisions to achieve a goal, but setting it should be done with input of people that have not been groomed that advertising is a human necessity.
You want people in government making long term strategic decisions that steer society. They should be listening to the will of the people as to what direction to steer it. I hope we can agree on that much.
I think people forget that "regulators" though are really just large organizations that enforce/interpret laws. The obvious example is the SEC; it has 4200 employees and none of them create laws, their rules are an effort to enforce the laws created by congress using their technical competence in finance.
> You want competence for strategically sound decisions to achieve a goal, but setting it should be done with input of people that have not been groomed that advertising is a human necessity.
That's the world we live in. Congress has been completely incompetent when it comes to regulating finance and I'd expect them to be even worse when it comes to technology.
There absolutely has to be a layer of industry specific competence (from "insiders") to make any sense of industry specific laws. I don't want insiders choosing direction though; I want congress to be less reprehensible idiots.
That boat has sailed. Those who aren't financially incentivized to push for ever more monetary easing are politically incentivized to push for it. We were one vote away from another $2 trillion of government spending and tomorrow the Fed is having an emergency meeting to address inflation. Like pouring gas on the fire while the fire department sets up the hoses.
Maybe allowing private money and politics to mix at all is the problem.
Behind the Bastards had 2 good episodes about it.[0][1]
[0]: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
[1]: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
At the same time, certain areas of regulation seem inevitably complex. Environmental regulations come to mind. There is an endless variety of environmental hazards and regulations must balance costs and benefits in light of the best available scientific evidence.
It's hard to imagine how this can be anything but the province of elite experts. Politicians or the private sector handling it seems like a guaranteed nightmare (and was historically, that's why we have these agencies).
Has this ever worked in any place on earth ?
Also your very notion of having a referee means applying rules made by a higher entity, which is the gov itself ? Even assuming your vision of the gov just makes fewer simpler rules and don’t change them, we fall into what we are seeing right now with the Olympics: outdated rules that are as arbitrary as it can, and fall short at every corner of reality, gamed through every nook and cranny , with everything staying in place only because the main actors have never been the participants but the countries and corporations.
You mean like a company who force an NDA on you or force you to not work with the competition? Also working at the FDA and be the one to approve a drug and then leave and work for the same company that made said drug, is just pure corruption.
I think you're completely wrong, especially about 1. Human nature doesn't shape our technological reality, it is becoming more and more obvious that technological reality shapes human culture. And people mistake culture as "nature".
Human nature is very plastic, trying to fit any one thing into "human nature" is (this is my humble opinion, please don't be offended) very bigoted.
Of course, I didn't believe this when I was young either.
I agree that zealotry is best avoided.
However, please note that cutting people out of discussion "because this is something you'll learn as you age" is not a great way to convince them of something (which may not be your goal).
You've ignored the majority of what I've said, including everything about how age is not a bright dividing line between the wise and the foolish.
Evidently you want to keep believing what you believe. So, go ahead and do that. I really can't stop you and don't wish to.
On the plasticity of human nature, here are a few of the many unfortunate things that will never be excised from human nature: self-absorption, self-deception, groupthink, dehumanization of the outgroup.
Culture can modulate the expression of these things, and if we're lucky, mitigate them somewhat. But they never quite go away. They always find a way to manifest themselves. And it is the people who think they've transcended these things who are most at risk of indulging in their worst excesses.
If you don't recognize the durable aspects of human nature, you're setting yourself up to be at best a dupe and a mark, and at worst a monster.
u mean mandatory vaccination?
But keep in mind we've had mandatory childhood immunizations for decades and almost everyone supports them.
Which diseases and how wide the requirement tends to be context-dependent. MMR in school, for example, is generally justified because school attendance is mandatory, so forcing people to be in an environment where a preventable disease will spread is inhumane if the spread can be stopped.
COVID-19 vaccination doesn't guarantee a person cannot become infected or infectious. It significantly diminishes spread (a person stricken with the virus and extremely symptomatic is more contagious than a person who is carrying the virus but asymptomatic; mechanically, coughing, sneezing, and gasping for air with fluid-filled lungs sprays more virus-laden particles into the air; it also seems likely that a vaccinated person who picks up an infection throws fewer virus particles in regular breathing, though the studies that I've seen seem to have mixed results on that).
The other reason to vaccinate people is load on medical services; even if someone who is vaccinated is infected, the odds they'll get so symptomatic they wind up in the hospital go way down. Hospitals filled with COVID-19 patients have far fewer resources to dedicate to "everyday" emergencies (heart attacks, car crashes, etc.)... The result being that COVID-19, left unmitigated, can cause systemic collapse of a country's health infrastructure and resulting death due to preventable conditions (because there's nobody available to prevent them).
It's easy to forget (now that most people are vaccinated) how virulent this virus is, and how severe the symptoms are, unmitigated. There's a good reason the world medical community snapped into action on this one.
Self-awareness is another quality that may come with age.
Reminds me of a certain manifesto from the 90s. It starts like this: "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."
More happily, it also reminds me of Douglas Adams:
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”
Recently Facebook had a drop in daily users for the first time ever and the stock plummeted. Quaranteenies aren't signing up for it and adults are increasingly walking away from it.
It is absolutely not too late, it is never too late.
I feel like Instagram is utterly toxic in the materialistic ideals it spreads, but TikTok mostly seems to have been fairly harmless compared to Facebook and Twitter which just seem to be rage amplifiers.
Also Telegram groups seem to be a hive of scum and villany, but also the organising ground for people fighting for their freedom, so I don't know how I feel about it.
Young people seem to have drifted away from the "broadcast" social media systems and towards messaging systems, but as a middle-age person without teenage kids I suspect I'm probably being naive.
On balance, Adams definitely had the more relaxed, froody attitude towards it all.
If the next president ran on a platform of regulating social media as the harmful and addictive product it is, people would probably be receptive. Everyone knows they have an addiction but without collective action the spell can't be broken.
No social media company is going to regulate themselves, but if there was industry wide regulation they could probably find some peace of mind knowing they can implement more healthy practices without fear of a competitor undercutting them.
However now if I make a plain html website nobody will see it because google will not rank it above all the SEO blog spam and portal results (e.g. Reddit, Quora) and everybody is too busy arguing about something on Reddit/Twitter/Facebook and watching the latest viral 30second tiktok vids to care. Everybody is in one pasture or another being shepherded by vampire corporate interests harvesting their time and emotions.
You're misunderstanding the true sticky feature of Facebook for the billions of normal non-geek users. It's not html/css authoring; it's the real names database. In other words, the so-called "social graph" of known identities rather than something like HN/reddit which have mostly anonymous or pseudonymous ids.
I tried to explain the "Rolodex of real names" aspect in a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18728061
A cigarette does the same. It provides value the moment it is lit and the first drag enters the lung.
I quit smoking a little more than 9 years ago. There are still quite a few moments I miss this felt value.
I quit Facebook about a year ago. I still keep the account but removed everything I ever posted there. Still as I recently started to do genealogy my SO showed me the groups she uses for that on Facebook (it is the only thing she does there). So probably I will start using FB again once I dig deeper into my ancestors as these groups are really helpful and provide value.
If these groups were some other place I would gladly be there. Sadly they are not.
Personally my ideal "social network" would be personal RSS feeds for everyone, but that's never going to be the winning method. It needs to be something dead simple for a non-techie.
I don't mean to be obtuse, I hate Googlebook more than most, but... have you tried? Where I lived before I had a fixed public IPv4, and I put a box up with Caddy on it serving markdown to the world and people actually did find it and sent me e-mails about it. All I did was post links to small forums. Granted, it wasn't exactly mainstream content. But it worked.
They haven't learned anything except how to be sneakier. They haven't changed, except as to the minimum possible extent demanded by law.
Which I think helps prove your point.
I wish I shared your optimism. It would be immediately weaponised (on social media, of course) as an attack on free speech, or whatever is needed to get the right people riled up.
Social media is awful but a) the vast majority love it (if you told my mother she was losing Facebook she’d be livid) and b) it serves the interests of the powers that be.
But I beg folks, please don't use 'weaponizing' and 'freedom of speech' in the same sentence, because doing so renders this principle/moral into a cynical shell instead of something that is part and parcel of core democratic values (and has had an ancient political history and evolution, with many sacrifices along the way).
Everyone says that but what specifically are you looking for? What’s the social media equivalent to no smoking indoors?
There's no (in the U.S.) legal precedence to regulate "misinformation" and hate speech, not because these things are good, but because they, unlike smoking, require authorities to create sets of approved and unapproved information, . There is a precedent of governments controlling harmful information and it isn't good - thus the bar should be set way high.
I'm not sure what you mean by "everyone says that." A lot of people say these are private platforms and rebut that one can always create a competitor, for example. Certainly it's a common refrain about techie communities such as this.
Tech (big and small) is regulated today and there are rules on the books which protect at least some of the individual privacy points you highlighted. [1] You, and many others, have stated that you find those rules insufficient and would like new/different rules in place.
Can you provide specific goals that address the issues that you think exist, and that law makers could use to draft new policy?
[1] https://www.rocketlawyer.com/business-and-contracts/business... and https://www.rocketlawyer.com/business-and-contracts/business...
So far as I know, there was never a system where each cigarette could advertise a politician, but if there were, when world today may look different.
Sorry, but it's literally as simple as closing the tab. I stopped using Facebook on a regular basis in 2019 by uninstalling the app from my phone as well as just not logging on from the desktop. I never found it so addicting that I couldn't go without it for awhile.
It’s literally as simple as not putting a cigarette in your mouth and smoking it.
> I never found it so addicting that I couldn't go without it for awhile
Crazy thought but what if we had a sample size bigger than you.
Literally the approach I used when I quit smoking.
> Crazy thought but what if we had a sample size bigger than you.
Well, that sounds like something everyone can agree on. Or do you just mean your opinion is bigger than anyone who disagrees?
Most of all, don't try to legislate away everyone's freedoms because you have a problem with something.
https://m.economictimes.com/tech/internet/social-media-more-...
Edit: i mean political parties and not just a single supposed monolith that is government. The two aren’t quite separate though.
Facebook’s (sorry, Meta’s) VR, and then Neuralink, used to suck many people into virtual worlds and keep them “engaged” to feed the profit motive of the Wall St quarterly earnings (capitalism requires platforms to extract rents after all)
But why stop at the virtual world?
Ubiquitous cameras and wifi that can easily track everyone by their appearance, gait, heartbeat and other signatures etc. become commonplace.
Artificial intelligence with access to this info is used to predict all kinds of inconvenient gatherings and movements taking place and nip them in the bud, leading to precrime.
Deepfakes that make any sort of video evidence useless, while AI creates plausible “parallel construction” to win court cases against anyone
Drones become cheap to manufacture, and rogue drones can drop grenades anywhere without any way to figure out who launched them
Swarming autonomous slaughterbots that bring down the cost of eliminating anyone, first by governments, then by private actors.
Guns become cheap to 3d-print while replicating biological agents become cheap to release.
Bitcoin mining rewards make it more profitable to spend kilowatt-hours on using Proof of Work to secure those same 7 transactions per second than on air conditioning and brownouts regularly occur worldwide.
Think this is far-fetched or we can somehow solve these problems? How are we doing with the last few decades of problems:
Humanity is like a young teenager that lives on a credit card, that future generations have to pay. We think we are so clever and so much smarter than previous generations, because we know the truth revealed by science. But we aren’t wise enough to use it sustainably.At best, humanity is building a zoo for itself to be run by a benevolent AI, while the rest of the planet is turned into monocultures and factory farms.
At worst, the AI will not understand human needs and we’ll just all be frustrated all the time, or perhaps countries will just nuke the planet. Where is that nuclear clock?
I'd say that those two scenarios directly contradict each other in many ways.
First of all, the cameras would have watermarks signed with private keys to authenticate the video so the deepfakes won’t matter.
Secondly, no need to prove anything, in order to do the AI thing and precrime.
And thirdly, when it comes to court cases, however you make arguments, the AI can help you make lots of plausible info for parallel construction.
Most tech does not serve any real utility like this. Beyond generating money through increasingly deceitful means, what does Google do nowadays? The search engine has helped turn the internet into white noise. It has essentially become the obstacle it was designed to bypass.
If it wasn't for extremely targeted and manipulative advertising a lot of tech products wouldn't have a place in the world at all.
In the same time, hackernews has become a negative spiral of death. Every third post is negatively fatalist in some sort. From cancer to civilization and environmental collapse. Keep in mind, you can be fatalist in a positive way.
Everywhere you look, you see what you are looking for. As wallstreet people say, it is never as bad or as good as you think.
I suggest you do:
and just unblock it from time to time if you wanna see whats up. (thats what I do)I wrote a comment showing far worse and more dangerous trends. But now let me address what you wrote 42 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29759615
Yes, capitalism gets like this when the small thing you built becomes bigger than you. And if you take VC money and then IPO to Wall St they will force you to perpetually every extract rents from your users in the form of their attention, engagement, advertising tolerance, and your “slow AI” will push out of management anyone who doesn’t get with the program to satisfy quarterly earnings. People who bought shares at $200 will make a lot of noise and can be quite persuasive to make sure their shares don’t drop to $5.
That’s why Google dropped “don’t be evil” motto and now gets “right up to the line without crossing it”: profit motive of shareholders.
Web3 was going to fix it but (the network would be owned by the participants) but the industry got stuck using outdated technology (blockchain) because it perversely promised things built on it to become slower and more expensive over time, so buying the block reward / fee token would pay off by making it “worth more” in the future.
This is going to be fixed. We are working on exactly this microtransaction alternative: https://qbix.com/token
However, keep in mind that advertising may always be more lucrative than microtransactions, for Facebook and other capitalist “privately owned” social networks. There are many goods and services in the world that pay far more in commissions to the social network, and as long as that is the case, it would be more lucrative to get money from them than having the users pay some membership fees to access content. And besides, if you can get free content, why pay for it?
No, the way to get out of this mess is to finally realize that capitalism and the profit motive has diminishing returns the bigger an organization gets, and that transitioning to a gift economy with no profit motive and no celebrities (wikipedia, science, creative commons, peer review) is far better for humanity.
Once everyone is in VR and using neuralink, it will be even more pronounced. The problem started when your computers were miniaturized into mobile phones and had always-on internet. You’re already a “cyborg”. Now, consider … would you want your back end software to be produced and hosted by a for-profit capitalist company beholden to wall street? Or by an open source thing like Wordpress, Matrix or Qbix that you can at least control your own metaverse and not pay rents?
Most people, like a slowly cooked frog, will just choose to become the borg basically. Not as a conscious decision, but by a thousand cuts from friends who urge you to get that latest VR headset with the brain interface so you can smell their latest pot pie, which is a limited edition sponsored by Friday’s, of course. It’s like the movie “Eagle eye” where everyone is recruited to keep you on track, and everyone is peer-pressured by N people.
Unless permissionless open source platforms become compelling enough to compete and disrupt centralized for-profit platforms, as Web 1.0 disrupted and destroyed America Online, CompuServe, Prodigy, MSN, Minitel, magazines, newspapers, and other gatekeepers — while VOIP / multimedia on the Internet severely undercut the telecom cartel ($3 a minute calls), cable channels, the companies using the radio spectrum etc.
We are currently living in digital feudalism. That’s what you are describing: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-c...
I have been free of almost all big tech for a long time and love the freedom from surveillance, censorship, and manipulation.
The list of alternatives are long to list here in a post. The challenge is in marketing to get your friends and family onto small tech too. Because these solutions are free and don't take anything from you, they have no multi billion dollar marketing budgets like big tech. You learn about them by following HN, Mastodon, and Reddit.
I am currently building out my own servers from home to host these services using Yunohost which makes it quite easy. I do like learning a lot of new things, but my motivation is to help my friends and family. This can spread one group at a time.
I think Amazon has added a ton of value to end-users. (No affiliation with Amazon.)
Star Trek had a very utopian sense about technology, were tech giants have a much more distopian sense about it. For instance, in both cases, we want an AI that can understand regular language, and give us accurate results for our requests. In Star Trek, every ship has this tech, and it's all used without any thought of privacy concerns or what it means for a computer to be always listening. In fact, as far as I can think, Star Trek never really had self-awareness about what the technology the people of that time used and it's implications (like privacy, but there are likely many more ethical concerns).
This led me to a bit of a split mind on technology. Using speech recognition as the example. Yes, it would be great if I could ask a computer something and it can answer me. No, it would not be great if that information was used to manipulate me or exploit my situation (like suggesting products to buy).
I do think all advancements are a two-edged sword. Is it orwellian? I definitely agree. My phone is always listening (even when there are claims it is not, or it's in standby mode), cameras are small enough to fit in a pocket and be used any time. Outside of living in a cave, you can choose what you participate in. You don't _need_ a smart phone - your emails can be answered when you sit at a computer, your calls can go to voicemail when you're not home. You don't _need_ to be on facebook - get your photos printed, save your videos to DVDs, share them with people when you invite them over.
A popular saying is vote with your wallet, but it can also be vote with your attention, too! Don't use social media if you think it sucks. Just log out, deactivate your account, and live your life. Don't share information on the internet you don't want to be used against you, and that even includes things like purchases on amazon, your address, or anything else.
It's only too late if you're not willing to do anything about it. Don't blame big tech if at the same time, you're logging in and feeding them your attention. It's not up to you how other people waste their time, either, but you can encourage different behaviour by having real-life interactions without technology in the way.
C'mon man don't let the narrative get to you!
Cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) will separate money and state, no more wars no more lopsided battles no more power asymmetry, no more printing and giving to those closest, no more printing machines in the hands of the 3 letter agencies, etc.
It will bring great progress to humanity if we adopt it.
> The internet is like an opiate
Yeah
> as sheep and resulting in time and energy being wasted by literally billions
The people that are manipulated by Big Tech would be manipulated anyways by Big Media, sadly. But maybe it's more worrisome with Big Tech.