It's pretty obvious why people hate the tech industry - perhaps not recognizing this is symptomatic of the problem. (As a partial participant in this industry, I'm personally ambivalent.)
The most successful tech companies all drive negative social impact. Social media like Facebook, Twitter, et. al each inflict unique psychological damage on their users, widely seen as net negative for each of them. Amazon, Google, MSFT, and other huge players are all now known to be selling our data to just about anyone, eroding privacy and possibly also freedoms by providing data to governments. Many other tech companies are, at best, making it easier for companies to extract money from consumers and for employers to need fewer people. I like streaming shows and music, but even the net benefits of streaming are dubious since people are much more content to sit on ass instead of engaging each other and enjoying each other's company. Not to mention the effect social media all has had on political discourse.
I don't know how much of the above is actually tech's fault, but it definitely feels that way to me, and I'm pretty certain these are commom beliefs.
> The most successful tech companies all drive negative social impact.
A positive social impact — that is, a net positive externality — is created value that hasn’t been captured. From a corporate perspective, that is waste. A negative social impact — a net negative externality — is a cost that has been passed off to other people. Eliminating the former in favor of the latter is the natural incentive of any business.
You’ve basically described one segment of the tech industry and assumed all tech is like that. You’re talking about consumer tech.
There is a wide range of tech that has nothing to do with consumers or anything social: manufacturing, medical, hardware drivers, command & control, finance, safety systems, etc…
> they have little if any noticeable impact on my daily life
I mean, all of those modern technologies actually affect a large fraction of everything you do when you're not in front of a screen... (Maybe such technology has existed in a similar form your whole life, though, so you don't notice, but over a longer timespan we are are talking about the majority of modern society).
I am mostly considering developments over the past decade. I think people were really optimistic about tech progress until relatively recently. Maybe it's just me, though.
That’s fine, aside from being a source to extract money from, consumers don’t matter. They have no choice but to use whatever we build. We’re not talking about shitty apps, we’re talking about everything else they take for granted and is deeply embedded in daily life.
I think my point is people should just be quiet about things they know nothing about. 10% of tech is consumer tech and the other 90% of tech is the things that run daily life that people know nothing about. Think machine to machine communications, scheduling systems, fraud detection, facial recognition, infrastructure, manufacturing, etc… you can have a whole career in tech and never have to think about consumer markets. One of my first jobs in tech was writing programs to cut parts out of expensive materials so efficiently that waste was minimized as much as possible, saving so much money, getting fat bonuses.
If you hear the word tech and just think of websites, apps, social networks, ads, you have a very simple world view.
So yea, consumer tech sucks, but consumers also fucking suck, and get harder and harder to extract some kind of value from as time goes on.
Ah, well it was news to some people that tech entrepreneurs aren't exactly beloved and I was explaining why I think that is. I know something about that, anyway. Also not totally clueless about a steady march of technological progress that most people don't notice the benefits of. Since people don't notice it, it's not relevant to why people don't love tech entrepreneurs, hence the question. It's about perception.
The "consumers suck" attitude probably goes a long way towards explaining the problem.
I mean... what tech do people interact with most? Consumer fucking tech.
Someone said it better below
"You know why people hate the tech industry? Because they've wedged themselves into everything, and made it suck more, in pursuit of glorious advertising profits."
> I like streaming shows and music, but even the net benefits of streaming are dubious...
And you can only pull "Yeah, I know you liked that show, but it wasn't as profitable as we hoped, so we're not renewing it for another season!" so many times before people get irritated.
> ...since people are much more content to sit on ass instead of engaging each other and enjoying each other's company.
I've been trying to aggressively create opportunities for people to interact in person, usually around a firepit, and it's far, far better than any amount of hours spent in front of screens.
I'm sure Fairchild Semiconductor had its detractors, but I wouldn't say anyone hated them except William Shockley.
The article lists some good causes, and they are fairly recent (Juicero was where I started to see real mockery of Silicon Valley startups). There are others that the author does not list, perhaps out of discretion:
* Tech profits concentrated in one geographic region have contributed to a high cost of living that makes life very hard for non-tech workers in the area, fostering resentment
* A lot of tech companies have ad- and engagement- based business models that are... not necessary healthy for their users, or for society
* Predatory data harvesting has led to a justified mistrust of new products and services
* New technology has always "disrupted" careers (farewell, ETAOIN SHRDLU), but advances in AI are threatening to do so in a way that most people thought would not be possible in their working lifetime, with these changes happening in the timescale between the time where you enroll in a particular major and graduate to an obsolete profession.
I thought that was a local (NIMBY/housing) issue? Do the shifting opinions mentioned in the article apply outside of silicon valley, and outside the US?
It's a developer 'wants to provide real estate cash flow' issue. Same people who provide early startup funding in other markets looking to drive relo and office rents.
That was fringe, and it was limited to San Francisco, which has been dysfunctional and unaffordable since at least the 1990s. The broad-based and justified hatred for tech is new.
Startups did a really job of branding themselves as “not corporate.” It’s like Trump—claim to be populist and revolutionary but secretly replicate all the self-serving rubbish practices of the establishment you say you are fighting.
You know what the biggest problem for me is with tech and computers in general? I don't think tech companies have actually made the world better, in fact, every single day of my life I can see countless examples of how the technology gold rush has generated worse outcomes for everyone involved. I love computers, but I also have to admit most of my problems in life come from them. Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars, developers study for years, but we still get low quality software everywhere that instead of solving issues they create more.
Life could be simpler. It used to be simpler. And I believe it will go back to be simpler when our minds get rid of the haze this technology gold rush has created, and we simply as developers and users start valuing free software, simplicity and consistency. I'm just not confident it will happen soon, though. I think we still have at least a few tech bubbles and a few thousand startups before we reach that point.
The world is much better than it used to be, you’re just more aware of all the present evil because the evidence is so much easy to gather, disseminate, and search for.
Nobody was aware of the extent of police criminality before everyone had a camera in their pocket, as just one example.
Perhaps, but as I said I also see it around me. Many of their problems also arise from computers. There are two way I see people dealing with this:
- It's normal, I don't need to do anything. These people are the ones who were born 90s or later. They see computers as a simple fact of life.
- It's not a problem, at least we have something. These people will generally be older and I think fail to see the incredible potential benefits of tricking a rock into thinking for you.
These are all generalizations of course, not social facts but simply representations of how I experience reality. The thing that really ticks me in the wrong is that people in other industries don't always see the things they do as a net negative for humanity.
For instance, most types of engineering such as civil, eletrical, chemical, etc. have real net positive benefits in the way I and everyone around me experiences life. I've never seen a civil engineer say they hate how we built bridges. I've met very few computers scientists who were confident about the way we deal with computers.
Anyways, this is just a long way of saying I agree, but that I don't think it invalidates what I talked about tech companies not being a net positive.
> most types of engineering such as civil, eletrical, chemical, etc. have real net positive benefits in the way I and everyone around me experiences life
They do _now_. During their exponential-growth phase I think there were lots of negative externalities? (Pollution, etc). And we still have to regulate them heavily to avoid societal problems.
Another post in this thread mentioned it's all the closed-platform/walled-garden/attention-grabbing/rent-seeking behavior which is the worst aspect of "tech"... honestly I have the feeling we just haven't gotten around to learning how to regulate these well yet, just like it took a while to figure out how to control (local) pollution (I mean, even this is still a huge problem with global carbon pollution).
>I've never seen a civil engineer say they hate how we built bridges.
You must not have spoken with any of the civil engineers I've spoken with. They all describe an absolute wasteland of arbitrary and capricious regulations, competing stakeholders, and last minute requirement changes that require extensive redesign and often very expensive rework.
Software engineering really isn't all that different from all engineering, for better and for worse.
You don't think your life has been substantially improved by Google? Or the Internet more generally? You'd rather go back to the '90s, when you had to carefully watch how much Internet you consumed, so as to keep from running out of AOL hours? You want to go back to an era when you couldn't instantly pull up navigation direction in a foreign city? You like to to take photos on film, paying ridiculous prices for every photo you took, and then paying again to have some stranger paw through your family photos while developing them? You want to go back to an era when batteries were heavy, polluting NiCd bricks, which required special chargers that would completely discharge and recharge them in order to avoid things like the memory effect? You want to go back to a time when you had to call a person on a phone in order to book a flight. You want to go back to a time when, if you moved to a different country, you got to talk to your relatives in the homeland once a month, for five to ten minutes on a noisy analog phone line, because that's all the international long distance you could afford?
Don't get me wrong, I dislike social media just as much as anyone. But do I dislike tech? Would I give up the all innumerable ways that my life has gotten better thanks to Moore's Law, ubiquitous Internet, and the proliferation of tools and services that take advantage of the above two? Absolutely not.
I do think those things are great but I would say that culture is substantially worse. People are less kind/patient, more disrespectful, more isolated, more narcissistic, less family oriented, more politically combative, have shorter attention spans, and are less happy than prior generations.
Do you have evidence about that? Don't you think so many people being terminally online affects the way they act towards others?
Personally, I believe it does. It's even ironic to me that your comment was downvoted, like, why? Is this really how we think about the world nowadays? Dislike/like. No discussion.
Anyways, I have to say Hackers News has been the source of well spent evenings with this nice community, so there's at least one data point there that these changes in culture weren't caused by tech.
>I do think those things are great but I would say that culture is substantially worse.
Only if you aren't a misfit. If you had some "weird" hobby or interest, like anime, or science fiction, or heck, even computers, you'd have maybe one, two other people in your life who were interested in that. If you openly talked about your "weird" hobby, you'd be as likely as not socially ostracized and made fun of.
Today, thanks to the internet and social media, one can find forums and discussion groups for any hobby, no matter how weird or esoteric, and have fun conversations with people that have nothing to do with weather, politics, or sportsball.
I was (am) some sort of misfit and I get that it feels good to find community online, but not everything that feels good is the best for us or for society.
Having a village full of people who don’t engage with each other because they’ve found more interesting people online is troubling.
And I don’t know, but it’s plausible that learning a healthy way to integrate with your local community is an important life skill that gets disrupted by these online connections and makes the big picture of one’s life worse than it would have been otherwise. Connecting online may relieve stress the way alcohol relieves stress — genuinely useful in any moment, but easily problematic if you become too reliant on it.
>it’s plausible that learning a healthy way to integrate with your local community is an important life skill that gets disrupted by these online connections and makes the big picture of one’s life worse
Yes, let's go back and tell all the kids that were being bullied in high school merely for being different that their bullies are teaching them important life skills and that they shouldn't retreat into online spaces because that will make the "big picture" of their life worse.
The weird thing is that I never needed computer assisted navigation until it existed. In my local area I simply remembered where streets were, and when traveling I used a map book.
I also cherished photos and put more effort into taking them. Now I just spam the photo button and wait on Google to select the best one to automatically improve and remind me of later. Even then, I have so many that I never find myself flipping through them like I did with physical photos.
I read encyclopedias. The many volumes were an invitation to knowledge, dillineated by pages and sections. Online knowledge is an endless pit of knowledge of questionable value.
Really, it wasn't bad. I'd say peak value was around 98 or 99. Before XMLHTTPRequest became popular, when the web was still mostly documents and forms. NNTP still mattered, and Encarta was useful.
After that I've just felt like I am swimming upriver against an assault to my humanity.
>The weird thing is that I never needed computer assisted navigation until it existed. In my local area I simply remembered where streets were, and when traveling I used a map book.
You are extremely fortunate. It may not be apparent to you, but the advent of GPS, smartphones and Google Maps has been a game changer for so many people. My sense of direction is all right. I'm not a homing pigeon, but given a map, I can generally find my way around. But for other people such as my mom, every trip, outside of some well-traveled routes (like going to work, or going to the store) had to have detailed written directions, and be rehearsed ahead of time, because otherwise she'd get lost. For her, Google Maps has resulted in a substantial improvement in the quality of her life, simply by enabling her to get around in the world without the constant background terror of not knowing how to get home.
I would give up all these things if I could. In fact that's my life plan, I want to get enough money to be comfortable (not necessarily financially independent) and move into the countryside in some temperate climate country. This is not my retirement plan, it's my life plan.
My retirement will be spent isolated from society, although that's another matter for another day. But seriously, perhaps my perspective is warped by the fact that I'm used to all these things already. Kind of like how the best software is the one you never hear or think about since it doesn't get in your way.
What a superficial collection of things to care about. Those things may tickle you a little when you’re taking advantage of them, but they really don’t make a substantial difference in whether you’re spending your days well and happy.
The 1990’s weren’t some dreary hellscape. You worked, you talked to people, you went out for dinner, you did some chores, you traveled. You had some crises that sent your life reeling, and some magical moments that made you grateful for what you had.
It was quite fine.
And in the ways that it was characteristically different(not better or worse), people were more engaged with what was right in front of them, had more shared experiences of life and media to relate about, and were less flooded with constant stimulation.
All the things you mention as accumulating in the years since are about as meaningful as the aisles and aisles of plastic toys I longed for at Toys-r-us as a kid. I thought they mattered, but they really don’t.
You can totally still live a '90s lifestyle today. Cancel your high-speed Internet and tether to your phone for everything. Give up watching YouTube. Give up looking things up on Wikipedia. Film cameras are a dime-a-dozen on eBay, with even high-end SLRs from the '90s selling for less than a hundred dollars. Disable Google Maps and Google Search. Stop posting on Hacker News.
If you think the '90s were better than they were today, by all means, go back.
EDIT: For what it's worth, you can find people in the 1930s saying the same things about electricity and indoor plumbing. Every current generation's necessity is the previous generation's excess frivolity.
The 90s has my youth, so...of course they were better.
I remember discovering gopher on university library computers in 1993, like I discovered the fun of CPM on my Dad's Osbourne in 1982. There was a nice mystery back then, things are definitely "better" now, except for prices and traffic.
You're deluding yourself if you think you would get the same lifestyle by giving up your own post-90s technology. The world as a whole has moved on. Maybe map books aren't at every gas station now. Even if you don't have a phone, the people you talk to are going to be checking theirs while dining with you, or distracted when they get a notification.
I suspect you're not old enough to properly remember the '90s if you really think this would be the equivalent.
I'm not saying it was all sunshine and rainbows (people smoked everywhere, did tons of cocaine, and were probably more openly homophobic/misogynistic/racist, and if you got in an argument over a factual detail you couldn't look up the answer right away).
There was a Tweet from Andreessen the other day about how tech is heading toward a $100 full wall TV while college (a tech resister) to $1 million [1] - supposedly because of regulation or some other nonsense. Guess what - a college education is worth a great deal more to society and the individual that gets it than a TV of any size will ever be worth IMHO. It is this Tech fixes everything/software eats the world attitude that is pissing people off. The only people that think it is a great thing are people that never have to waste 20 minutes of their time finding their way through a phone menu at a bank because they have a minion that does everything for them and lets them avoid the very tech they create. Disruptive companies make the most money even if they really don't improve people lives.
Tech is reaching a stage where the garbage/useful ratio is > 1. This is actually what I use to like about Musk when he pretended to run his companies and smoked cigars at the Playboy mansion. He actually tried to get truly innovative and useful technology worked on. Not anymore.
> Guess what - a college education is worth a great deal more to society and the individual that gets it than a TV of any size will ever be worth IMHO.
Indeed, but capitalism does not care about society, but rather is there to make the person selling you the TV even richer.
I don’t think OP is suggesting tech has been an unmitigated negative. I think most of the things that were positives were invented 1995-2008. Beyond that major tech companies seemed to transform into whores to the advertising industry, privacy was destroyed, and for this we got social media, poorer search results, constant communication, etc etc - mostly negatives.
I agree with you, but I don't think we're ever going back to simpler times. While I'm not religious, I have often wondered if this is what the "Garden of Eden" story warned us about. Or more cynically, "Industrial Society and Its Future".
> Or more cynically, "Industrial Society and Its Future".
I always see myself calling the unabomber crazy, but then I remember he was a mathematician which studied in the MIT and he was probably much smarter than I could ever dream of being. "The Industrial society and it's consequences was a disaster for the human race" is something that passes through my mind somewhat often, sometimes jokingly, sometimes not. Maybe he did have a point.
edit: He studied at Harvard, not the MIT, memory failed me there. I don't condone any of his actions (i.e. bombing people).
Came to say this, glad someone else is doing down in flames with me ;)
To all the "yeah but what about all the good it's done" comments: I would gladly give all that up if it meant going back to the standards we had before around 2007 (though for me the 90s was the best time, I don't know how much of that has to do with the rose tint that teenagerhood gives you).
Even some of the good it's done is questionable. I can now order exactly what I want from a range of online shops at 2am, instead of going to the single jeans shop in my town and having to settle for the wrong size in the wrong brand. The flip side is that local shops have gone out of business, resulting in a loss of community, with all the ills that brings. Besides which, psychologists would argue that getting what you want isn't a good thing (and after years of getting what I want, I can confirm).
Article doesn't mention this, but Silicon Valley has a very intimate and very lopsided relationship with everybody at an individual level. It's constantly spying on you, censoring what you want to say, and trying to introduce you to new things and people whether you like it or not. Of course people are going to hate it, it's an abusive relationship. The onus is on silicon valley to step back and respect everybody's boundaries.
Something I recognize, when I talk to those born after the mid 90s, is that some of them get a large amount of anxiety from social media. Blurring the separation between online/real life/personas.
No one forced my friends or people I pass by to use any of the products provided tech companies.
Hell, most of my friends don't care about privacy or being tracked online, or having their information shared amongst other entities.
How many other devs here have had conversations with others about Net Neutrality (back in the day) or Privacy/Security and had people pat you on the head and said okay but let's move on? I recall people just not giving a shit when I talked about the ideal of Diaspora. Or choosing Open Source products that gravitate towards being transparent about what is actually being put into the software, including the type of telemetry being recorded.
If I sound jaded, it's because I am. The community chooses what it chooses. At some point the onus is on us, even if it means abstaining (hence why I stopped using Facebook over a decade ago).
Much of the tech industry is not about tech now. The actual tech was successful. Now, it’s all about locking up platform monopolies while confusing luck with ability and spreading that belief via right-wing libertarian politics. How many large “tech” companies are actually tech now?
Most are concerned with locking in customers, force feeding them ads, and caving to their worst instincts in the process. Crypto, as mentioned in the article, is a great example of all these. That “industry” has nothing to do with the tech.
Working in it, I don't like it anymore - I would raise my eyebrow considerably high at anyone claiming they loved it 100%. Maybe it's because all jobs kind of suck in a way, but it definitely fails to live to its claimed prestige in my books. There are definitely bodies in all the closets and you don't have to look very far to find them. It's a cultural issue and it seems systemic at this point - I say this as someone extremely privileged.
I don't think it's just tech though - this seems symptomatic of a larger societal issue and trust across everything is broken.
"When I started Kapwing in 2017, it was cool to be a tech entrepreneur. People looked up to techies."
There are always some people who have hated whatever new people have moved into the SF Bay Area and taken over things since before written history. It's a perennial Gold Rush. Each round of new arrivals thinks that they're coming here to be a part of something new and exciting and that they care deeply about the area and making sure it doesn't lose its special qualities. The reality is that there was all this amazing stuff that happened 10, 20, 50, 100, 500 etc years ago, and in a way nothing is new.
The "tech" industry of various flavors has had very mixed reactions at least back until the Luddites. Certainly in 2017 some people hated everything the "techies" were doing and wished they would stop. People were literally protesting Google Buses starting in 2013 as an embodiment of what tech was doing to destroy SF. [0]
(I'm not saying I don't like "tech" - whatever that is. I moved to SF in '94 to be part of whatever zeitgeist was happening back then - the web, whatever Wired Magazine was hyping at the time, cyberpunk, raves, etc.... I'm sure the generation before me was not all happy about that, and I know people my age or even younger who would prefer not to have so many people with insane tech salaries and techno-libertarian ideals distorting the economy.)
I don't think people hate all of tech. FOSS is still beloved. Small dev team projects are still supported outside the tech community. Its just SV and its very... Clintonesque(?) brand of doublespeak is becoming a bit trite.
People thought depositors should lose their money because they made the “irresponsible” decision to bank with a large, stable, well-known public institution.
Unnamed, hypothetical people may have said this.
But this wasn't what the twitter post that that snippet linked to actually said.
The article starts its point-of-view in 2017. Even by then, there were indicators times had changed. The regulatory and political environment was very favorable in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama years. The Internet was privatized rather quickly and without much room for public comment.
The reasons listed in the article apply for people who watch very closely—for most people who are not very tuned in it's a result of public opinion being swayed in the other direction by political figures. Whether it's due to wariness of a increasingly consolidated and powerful sector, collection of personal data, or because of perceived censorship, it adds up.
I disagree with the premise. In my eyes, it was always hated.
The narrative from my perspective (admittedly supported only by anecdata) is that people in the industry felt like it was loved because they loved themselves and only listened to themselves and others like them. Much in the way a CEO in a room full of yes-men might think the whole world loves them.
Maybe what's happening now is the yes-men are gone and the hate is finally coming from inside the house?
I don't think that was true. Back when the iPhone and Google or even Google Docs were recent artifacts, there was a lot of positive press and interest from traditionally east coast enterprises, like politicos, about it. Popularity as polled was high too.
A lot of stuff has happened since then. Among them, the increasing optimization and understanding of surveillance business models, and a long-term ultra-low interest rate phenomena moving the allowing some...very odd marginal uses of capital.
The culture changed a lot too: from 1999 to 2011, if you look at the number of college applicants to computer science and/or computer engineering was cruising along. At 2011 it really started to take off (here I use UC Berkeley as a proxy, because I happen to know that number). I don't mean to suggest things would be better if they were put back the way they were -- for one, people in the field made way, way less money back then -- but it was...different. And the way it was embedded in the culture was different, this sudden change in applicants is more effect than cause.
To relate a story:
As a young man, I was visiting family in New York. I speak briefly with another young person, who asks what I do. I say "I'm a software engineer" and she asks "what do they do?" (My description: it's a bit like being an accountant, for computer programs)
Technology's place in the consciousness was so much smaller, a fun little producer of shiny baubles from time to time, already through its silly season in 1999. Well.
I've been a software engineer for awhile now, about 13 years full time, and I've grown to dislike the tech industry, but a large part of me wonders if I've simply become cynical enough to realize that tech isn't any better than any other industry like I previously thought.
I like my job, I've made a lot of really great friends, and I love hacking on software, but I've grown incredibly frustrated with how every tech company tries to convince me that I am saving the world by making the rich executives even richer. I hate that there's this bizarre culty loyalty expected of you at all times at FAANGs. I despise the double standard of "taking responsibility" that workers are supposed to have that executives simply lack.
Honestly, despite having worked in the industry full time for 12 years at the time, it took me being fully laid off last year to truly realize that it's ok for me to roll my eyes when given the typical bullshit; it's not a problem with me, and I suspect most professionals in most other industries have been doing that for forever.
> Some of tech’s heros have fallen. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates’s marriages fell apart. Elon Musk did some weird stuff and got into the Twitter debacle.
These guys are all billionaires. There is serious animosity toward billionaires right now. I think it is more their being the .1% than their marriages failing.
> People thought depositors should lose their money because they made the “irresponsible” decision to bank with a large, stable, well-known public institution.
It's always irresponsible to put all your investments into one location.
I once asked my dad where our family record player came from (it was a nice machine). He said it was what he got when a bank went bust.
You've heard the advice - diversify, diversify, diversify. It's the responsible thing to do.
I have a friend who uses a password manager, so he only has to remember one password. I tell him if that password gets compromised, or the manager gets compromised, he loses everything. He's unfazed by that risk - "can't happen", he says.
SVB put all their assets into T-bills. Then the Fed raised interest rates, the value of the old T-bills sank, and SVB couldn't cover its liabilities. It's just as irresponsible of SVB to put all in one as it is depositors to put all in one.
Yes, sentiment has changed. And from within the tech industry, apparently, the blinders are still as strong as ever...
The quote about "It's hard to force a man to understand something when his salary is dependent on him not understanding it" is relevant here. If you're in the tech bubble (and I use that term broadly to include "Most tech companies and surrounding companies/cities"), and don't regularly interact with people outside it, or pull back out of it and analyze it, you miss it.
> Startup fraud genre. ... The media frenzied around Elizabeth Holmes’ trial and sentencing.
No. Most people outside the tech industry don't care. If they know anything about Holmes, it's probably that the company outright lied about it was doing, repeatedly, over and over, across the board, and are pleasantly surprised to see that they actually faced consequences, because the normal tech industry path is that you lie to everyone, defraud investors, and still come away clean with your golden parachute. Which is utterly unlike the rest of the world, in which there tend to be consequences for actions that most people would consider "criminal."
You can only hear about how some new startup is going to "disrupt" some industry, based on what are pretty clearly absurdities to every normal person, before you expect the next one to go down in flames too. Most people have the good sense to recognize that "I'm going to sell you $10 of services for $8, but I'll make it up in volume!" either means you're going to try for monopoly and raise prices, or you're full of crap.
> The crazy rise and fall of crypto.
Again... what percentage of people were actually invested in crypto enough to even know or care? Go do one of the "Man on the street" surveys and ask people what Bitcoin is worth, +/- 10%, and you'll go through a lot of people before you find anyone even close. But, yes, a lot of people have heard the breathless hype about how Crypto Will Change Everything, and... it turns out to have been nothing much more than speedrunning the history of why we have various financial regulations.
> Past technology waves – mobile in the late 2000s, social in the early 2010s, and cloud in the mid-2010s – brought time and money savings to the average consumer and office worker.
They... sorry, what? Having to buy a new phone every couple years and pay $100/mo for a cell connection sure as hell wasn't saving money vs the previous, and having your attention weaponized against you didn't really win much goodwill, even as it was very profitable for a short period of time. "Cloud" is, similarly, something that most people don't know or care about. And I'll suggest that if you want to do anything serious, especially if you need a lot of disk or RAM, "colo your own boxes" is a far cheaper solution than cloud for quite a few companies. Also harder to compromise than cloud boxes.
> Some of tech’s heros have fallen. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates’s marriages fell apart. Elon Musk did some weird stuff and got into the Twitter debacle. Even beloved founders like Jack Conte and Patrick Collison got some bad press.
Nobody cares about Bezos and his marriage. Bill Gates is quite past many people caring about him. Elon Musk, though... yeah, he's gone from savior of the planet (through his companies that will be very profitable to him) to "Loose cannon on deck." And I guarantee most people outside tech circles have no idea who Jack Conte and Patrick Collision are. I'm in tech, and I had to look them up.
> VCs funding unsustainable business models.
Yeah, when they go about "disrupting" things and leaving a hot mess behind themselves, people get a bit annoyed. When "E-Scooters" get dumped by the thousands and end up broken and blocking sidewalks, or rusting in ponds, ...
> When I started Kapwing in 2017, it was cool to be a tech entrepreneur.
by 2017 Shark Tank was eight years old and Gwyneth Paltrow was a judge on apple’s short lived startup show that flopped. I really don’t know how much more obvious it could be that the trend had already jumped the shark in 2017.
Tech has definitely lost some of its shine, but I wonder if we’re assigning too much weight to the opinions of a relatively small number of loud mouth bullies on Twitter.
> The pandemic and dispersion of tech talent. SF used to be a mecca of tech talent: events, dinners, summits, etc that brought optimistic entrepreneurs together
This is a good thing, because people were under the mistaken impression that tech talent in SF was uniquely special or good. My theory is that the money and, more vaguely, the inspiration, of the region was infectious to those that were able to come and work there. A sort of mild self-selection but also a privilege open to only a few.
Meanwhile the rest of the world is stuffed full of people who are just as capable of making it at any "cut throat" startup, or starting such companies on their own, but don't live in such an environment where they can make the kinds of connections they need to make to get funding, or aren't getting a huge salary that lets the live comfortably while building personal projects, or the other things that make silicon valley such a hub for this sort of thing.
Hopefully now those effects disperse across the world and we get access to all the wildly different kinds of ideas all across the world. Maybe it'll mean less uber for x, CRM for y, CMS for z type products.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadWhat a sweet, innocent child.
I don't know how much of the above is actually tech's fault, but it definitely feels that way to me, and I'm pretty certain these are commom beliefs.
A positive social impact — that is, a net positive externality — is created value that hasn’t been captured. From a corporate perspective, that is waste. A negative social impact — a net negative externality — is a cost that has been passed off to other people. Eliminating the former in favor of the latter is the natural incentive of any business.
There is a wide range of tech that has nothing to do with consumers or anything social: manufacturing, medical, hardware drivers, command & control, finance, safety systems, etc…
I mean, all of those modern technologies actually affect a large fraction of everything you do when you're not in front of a screen... (Maybe such technology has existed in a similar form your whole life, though, so you don't notice, but over a longer timespan we are are talking about the majority of modern society).
If you hear the word tech and just think of websites, apps, social networks, ads, you have a very simple world view.
So yea, consumer tech sucks, but consumers also fucking suck, and get harder and harder to extract some kind of value from as time goes on.
The "consumers suck" attitude probably goes a long way towards explaining the problem.
Someone said it better below
"You know why people hate the tech industry? Because they've wedged themselves into everything, and made it suck more, in pursuit of glorious advertising profits."
And you can only pull "Yeah, I know you liked that show, but it wasn't as profitable as we hoped, so we're not renewing it for another season!" so many times before people get irritated.
> ...since people are much more content to sit on ass instead of engaging each other and enjoying each other's company.
I've been trying to aggressively create opportunities for people to interact in person, usually around a firepit, and it's far, far better than any amount of hours spent in front of screens.
Jewish people would like to have a word with you. My grandfathers would too.
Facebook alone will damn us all.
The article lists some good causes, and they are fairly recent (Juicero was where I started to see real mockery of Silicon Valley startups). There are others that the author does not list, perhaps out of discretion:
* Tech profits concentrated in one geographic region have contributed to a high cost of living that makes life very hard for non-tech workers in the area, fostering resentment
* A lot of tech companies have ad- and engagement- based business models that are... not necessary healthy for their users, or for society
* Predatory data harvesting has led to a justified mistrust of new products and services
* New technology has always "disrupted" careers (farewell, ETAOIN SHRDLU), but advances in AI are threatening to do so in a way that most people thought would not be possible in their working lifetime, with these changes happening in the timescale between the time where you enroll in a particular major and graduate to an obsolete profession.
Startups did a really job of branding themselves as “not corporate.” It’s like Trump—claim to be populist and revolutionary but secretly replicate all the self-serving rubbish practices of the establishment you say you are fighting.
Life could be simpler. It used to be simpler. And I believe it will go back to be simpler when our minds get rid of the haze this technology gold rush has created, and we simply as developers and users start valuing free software, simplicity and consistency. I'm just not confident it will happen soon, though. I think we still have at least a few tech bubbles and a few thousand startups before we reach that point.
We've actively made the world worse.
Nobody was aware of the extent of police criminality before everyone had a camera in their pocket, as just one example.
At the root of most evil in the western world is advertising, it is just hidden well because it is good at moving the blame to, e.g, tech.
Also those movements were there before tech.
If your life was cars you would soon find most of your problems in life come from cars.
- It's normal, I don't need to do anything. These people are the ones who were born 90s or later. They see computers as a simple fact of life.
- It's not a problem, at least we have something. These people will generally be older and I think fail to see the incredible potential benefits of tricking a rock into thinking for you.
These are all generalizations of course, not social facts but simply representations of how I experience reality. The thing that really ticks me in the wrong is that people in other industries don't always see the things they do as a net negative for humanity.
For instance, most types of engineering such as civil, eletrical, chemical, etc. have real net positive benefits in the way I and everyone around me experiences life. I've never seen a civil engineer say they hate how we built bridges. I've met very few computers scientists who were confident about the way we deal with computers.
Anyways, this is just a long way of saying I agree, but that I don't think it invalidates what I talked about tech companies not being a net positive.
They do _now_. During their exponential-growth phase I think there were lots of negative externalities? (Pollution, etc). And we still have to regulate them heavily to avoid societal problems.
Another post in this thread mentioned it's all the closed-platform/walled-garden/attention-grabbing/rent-seeking behavior which is the worst aspect of "tech"... honestly I have the feeling we just haven't gotten around to learning how to regulate these well yet, just like it took a while to figure out how to control (local) pollution (I mean, even this is still a huge problem with global carbon pollution).
You must not have spoken with any of the civil engineers I've spoken with. They all describe an absolute wasteland of arbitrary and capricious regulations, competing stakeholders, and last minute requirement changes that require extensive redesign and often very expensive rework.
Software engineering really isn't all that different from all engineering, for better and for worse.
Don't get me wrong, I dislike social media just as much as anyone. But do I dislike tech? Would I give up the all innumerable ways that my life has gotten better thanks to Moore's Law, ubiquitous Internet, and the proliferation of tools and services that take advantage of the above two? Absolutely not.
Personally, I believe it does. It's even ironic to me that your comment was downvoted, like, why? Is this really how we think about the world nowadays? Dislike/like. No discussion.
Anyways, I have to say Hackers News has been the source of well spent evenings with this nice community, so there's at least one data point there that these changes in culture weren't caused by tech.
There's huge kindnesses enabled by tech and the internet, like organizing group support, and healthcare kickstarters and so on.
I think youve got rose coloured glasses about the past more than today being particularly worse
Only if you aren't a misfit. If you had some "weird" hobby or interest, like anime, or science fiction, or heck, even computers, you'd have maybe one, two other people in your life who were interested in that. If you openly talked about your "weird" hobby, you'd be as likely as not socially ostracized and made fun of.
Today, thanks to the internet and social media, one can find forums and discussion groups for any hobby, no matter how weird or esoteric, and have fun conversations with people that have nothing to do with weather, politics, or sportsball.
Having a village full of people who don’t engage with each other because they’ve found more interesting people online is troubling.
And I don’t know, but it’s plausible that learning a healthy way to integrate with your local community is an important life skill that gets disrupted by these online connections and makes the big picture of one’s life worse than it would have been otherwise. Connecting online may relieve stress the way alcohol relieves stress — genuinely useful in any moment, but easily problematic if you become too reliant on it.
Yes, let's go back and tell all the kids that were being bullied in high school merely for being different that their bullies are teaching them important life skills and that they shouldn't retreat into online spaces because that will make the "big picture" of their life worse.
Maybe we should think creating a world where everyone can move around and form the sorts of villages they like.
I also cherished photos and put more effort into taking them. Now I just spam the photo button and wait on Google to select the best one to automatically improve and remind me of later. Even then, I have so many that I never find myself flipping through them like I did with physical photos.
I read encyclopedias. The many volumes were an invitation to knowledge, dillineated by pages and sections. Online knowledge is an endless pit of knowledge of questionable value.
Really, it wasn't bad. I'd say peak value was around 98 or 99. Before XMLHTTPRequest became popular, when the web was still mostly documents and forms. NNTP still mattered, and Encarta was useful.
After that I've just felt like I am swimming upriver against an assault to my humanity.
You are extremely fortunate. It may not be apparent to you, but the advent of GPS, smartphones and Google Maps has been a game changer for so many people. My sense of direction is all right. I'm not a homing pigeon, but given a map, I can generally find my way around. But for other people such as my mom, every trip, outside of some well-traveled routes (like going to work, or going to the store) had to have detailed written directions, and be rehearsed ahead of time, because otherwise she'd get lost. For her, Google Maps has resulted in a substantial improvement in the quality of her life, simply by enabling her to get around in the world without the constant background terror of not knowing how to get home.
My retirement will be spent isolated from society, although that's another matter for another day. But seriously, perhaps my perspective is warped by the fact that I'm used to all these things already. Kind of like how the best software is the one you never hear or think about since it doesn't get in your way.
The 1990’s weren’t some dreary hellscape. You worked, you talked to people, you went out for dinner, you did some chores, you traveled. You had some crises that sent your life reeling, and some magical moments that made you grateful for what you had.
It was quite fine.
And in the ways that it was characteristically different(not better or worse), people were more engaged with what was right in front of them, had more shared experiences of life and media to relate about, and were less flooded with constant stimulation.
All the things you mention as accumulating in the years since are about as meaningful as the aisles and aisles of plastic toys I longed for at Toys-r-us as a kid. I thought they mattered, but they really don’t.
You can totally still live a '90s lifestyle today. Cancel your high-speed Internet and tether to your phone for everything. Give up watching YouTube. Give up looking things up on Wikipedia. Film cameras are a dime-a-dozen on eBay, with even high-end SLRs from the '90s selling for less than a hundred dollars. Disable Google Maps and Google Search. Stop posting on Hacker News.
If you think the '90s were better than they were today, by all means, go back.
EDIT: For what it's worth, you can find people in the 1930s saying the same things about electricity and indoor plumbing. Every current generation's necessity is the previous generation's excess frivolity.
Would recommend.
I remember discovering gopher on university library computers in 1993, like I discovered the fun of CPM on my Dad's Osbourne in 1982. There was a nice mystery back then, things are definitely "better" now, except for prices and traffic.
I suspect you're not old enough to properly remember the '90s if you really think this would be the equivalent.
I'm not saying it was all sunshine and rainbows (people smoked everywhere, did tons of cocaine, and were probably more openly homophobic/misogynistic/racist, and if you got in an argument over a factual detail you couldn't look up the answer right away).
Tech is reaching a stage where the garbage/useful ratio is > 1. This is actually what I use to like about Musk when he pretended to run his companies and smoked cigars at the Playboy mansion. He actually tried to get truly innovative and useful technology worked on. Not anymore.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-warns-colleg...
Indeed, but capitalism does not care about society, but rather is there to make the person selling you the TV even richer.
edit: He studied at Harvard, not the MIT, memory failed me there. I don't condone any of his actions (i.e. bombing people).
To all the "yeah but what about all the good it's done" comments: I would gladly give all that up if it meant going back to the standards we had before around 2007 (though for me the 90s was the best time, I don't know how much of that has to do with the rose tint that teenagerhood gives you).
Even some of the good it's done is questionable. I can now order exactly what I want from a range of online shops at 2am, instead of going to the single jeans shop in my town and having to settle for the wrong size in the wrong brand. The flip side is that local shops have gone out of business, resulting in a loss of community, with all the ills that brings. Besides which, psychologists would argue that getting what you want isn't a good thing (and after years of getting what I want, I can confirm).
Hell, most of my friends don't care about privacy or being tracked online, or having their information shared amongst other entities.
How many other devs here have had conversations with others about Net Neutrality (back in the day) or Privacy/Security and had people pat you on the head and said okay but let's move on? I recall people just not giving a shit when I talked about the ideal of Diaspora. Or choosing Open Source products that gravitate towards being transparent about what is actually being put into the software, including the type of telemetry being recorded.
If I sound jaded, it's because I am. The community chooses what it chooses. At some point the onus is on us, even if it means abstaining (hence why I stopped using Facebook over a decade ago).
Most are concerned with locking in customers, force feeding them ads, and caving to their worst instincts in the process. Crypto, as mentioned in the article, is a great example of all these. That “industry” has nothing to do with the tech.
I don't think it's just tech though - this seems symptomatic of a larger societal issue and trust across everything is broken.
There are always some people who have hated whatever new people have moved into the SF Bay Area and taken over things since before written history. It's a perennial Gold Rush. Each round of new arrivals thinks that they're coming here to be a part of something new and exciting and that they care deeply about the area and making sure it doesn't lose its special qualities. The reality is that there was all this amazing stuff that happened 10, 20, 50, 100, 500 etc years ago, and in a way nothing is new.
The "tech" industry of various flavors has had very mixed reactions at least back until the Luddites. Certainly in 2017 some people hated everything the "techies" were doing and wished they would stop. People were literally protesting Google Buses starting in 2013 as an embodiment of what tech was doing to destroy SF. [0]
(I'm not saying I don't like "tech" - whatever that is. I moved to SF in '94 to be part of whatever zeitgeist was happening back then - the web, whatever Wired Magazine was hyping at the time, cyberpunk, raves, etc.... I'm sure the generation before me was not all happy about that, and I know people my age or even younger who would prefer not to have so many people with insane tech salaries and techno-libertarian ideals distorting the economy.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_tech_bus_protest...
Wow now. That's an interesting and a very good way to describe the problem that plagues SV in general...
> Clintonesque
Eye-roll.
I'll be generous and not kick back on that statistic, but even if its true, that last 1% is pretty vocally pro-FOSS.
>Eye-roll.
OK fair, you don't like the comparison. Can you provide a different way to say it then, instead of just dismissing the point?
Unnamed, hypothetical people may have said this.
But this wasn't what the twitter post that that snippet linked to actually said.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqyXvMrQDk8
The reasons listed in the article apply for people who watch very closely—for most people who are not very tuned in it's a result of public opinion being swayed in the other direction by political figures. Whether it's due to wariness of a increasingly consolidated and powerful sector, collection of personal data, or because of perceived censorship, it adds up.
The narrative from my perspective (admittedly supported only by anecdata) is that people in the industry felt like it was loved because they loved themselves and only listened to themselves and others like them. Much in the way a CEO in a room full of yes-men might think the whole world loves them.
Maybe what's happening now is the yes-men are gone and the hate is finally coming from inside the house?
A lot of stuff has happened since then. Among them, the increasing optimization and understanding of surveillance business models, and a long-term ultra-low interest rate phenomena moving the allowing some...very odd marginal uses of capital.
The culture changed a lot too: from 1999 to 2011, if you look at the number of college applicants to computer science and/or computer engineering was cruising along. At 2011 it really started to take off (here I use UC Berkeley as a proxy, because I happen to know that number). I don't mean to suggest things would be better if they were put back the way they were -- for one, people in the field made way, way less money back then -- but it was...different. And the way it was embedded in the culture was different, this sudden change in applicants is more effect than cause.
To relate a story:
As a young man, I was visiting family in New York. I speak briefly with another young person, who asks what I do. I say "I'm a software engineer" and she asks "what do they do?" (My description: it's a bit like being an accountant, for computer programs)
Technology's place in the consciousness was so much smaller, a fun little producer of shiny baubles from time to time, already through its silly season in 1999. Well.
I like my job, I've made a lot of really great friends, and I love hacking on software, but I've grown incredibly frustrated with how every tech company tries to convince me that I am saving the world by making the rich executives even richer. I hate that there's this bizarre culty loyalty expected of you at all times at FAANGs. I despise the double standard of "taking responsibility" that workers are supposed to have that executives simply lack.
Honestly, despite having worked in the industry full time for 12 years at the time, it took me being fully laid off last year to truly realize that it's ok for me to roll my eyes when given the typical bullshit; it's not a problem with me, and I suspect most professionals in most other industries have been doing that for forever.
These guys are all billionaires. There is serious animosity toward billionaires right now. I think it is more their being the .1% than their marriages failing.
It's always irresponsible to put all your investments into one location.
I once asked my dad where our family record player came from (it was a nice machine). He said it was what he got when a bank went bust.
You've heard the advice - diversify, diversify, diversify. It's the responsible thing to do.
I have a friend who uses a password manager, so he only has to remember one password. I tell him if that password gets compromised, or the manager gets compromised, he loses everything. He's unfazed by that risk - "can't happen", he says.
SVB put all their assets into T-bills. Then the Fed raised interest rates, the value of the old T-bills sank, and SVB couldn't cover its liabilities. It's just as irresponsible of SVB to put all in one as it is depositors to put all in one.
The quote about "It's hard to force a man to understand something when his salary is dependent on him not understanding it" is relevant here. If you're in the tech bubble (and I use that term broadly to include "Most tech companies and surrounding companies/cities"), and don't regularly interact with people outside it, or pull back out of it and analyze it, you miss it.
> Startup fraud genre. ... The media frenzied around Elizabeth Holmes’ trial and sentencing.
No. Most people outside the tech industry don't care. If they know anything about Holmes, it's probably that the company outright lied about it was doing, repeatedly, over and over, across the board, and are pleasantly surprised to see that they actually faced consequences, because the normal tech industry path is that you lie to everyone, defraud investors, and still come away clean with your golden parachute. Which is utterly unlike the rest of the world, in which there tend to be consequences for actions that most people would consider "criminal."
You can only hear about how some new startup is going to "disrupt" some industry, based on what are pretty clearly absurdities to every normal person, before you expect the next one to go down in flames too. Most people have the good sense to recognize that "I'm going to sell you $10 of services for $8, but I'll make it up in volume!" either means you're going to try for monopoly and raise prices, or you're full of crap.
> The crazy rise and fall of crypto.
Again... what percentage of people were actually invested in crypto enough to even know or care? Go do one of the "Man on the street" surveys and ask people what Bitcoin is worth, +/- 10%, and you'll go through a lot of people before you find anyone even close. But, yes, a lot of people have heard the breathless hype about how Crypto Will Change Everything, and... it turns out to have been nothing much more than speedrunning the history of why we have various financial regulations.
> Past technology waves – mobile in the late 2000s, social in the early 2010s, and cloud in the mid-2010s – brought time and money savings to the average consumer and office worker.
They... sorry, what? Having to buy a new phone every couple years and pay $100/mo for a cell connection sure as hell wasn't saving money vs the previous, and having your attention weaponized against you didn't really win much goodwill, even as it was very profitable for a short period of time. "Cloud" is, similarly, something that most people don't know or care about. And I'll suggest that if you want to do anything serious, especially if you need a lot of disk or RAM, "colo your own boxes" is a far cheaper solution than cloud for quite a few companies. Also harder to compromise than cloud boxes.
> Some of tech’s heros have fallen. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates’s marriages fell apart. Elon Musk did some weird stuff and got into the Twitter debacle. Even beloved founders like Jack Conte and Patrick Collison got some bad press.
Nobody cares about Bezos and his marriage. Bill Gates is quite past many people caring about him. Elon Musk, though... yeah, he's gone from savior of the planet (through his companies that will be very profitable to him) to "Loose cannon on deck." And I guarantee most people outside tech circles have no idea who Jack Conte and Patrick Collision are. I'm in tech, and I had to look them up.
> VCs funding unsustainable business models.
Yeah, when they go about "disrupting" things and leaving a hot mess behind themselves, people get a bit annoyed. When "E-Scooters" get dumped by the thousands and end up broken and blocking sidewalks, or rusting in ponds, ...
...keep shoveling more of it down our throats with no end in sight.
This is how we get to the world of Neuromancer
by 2017 Shark Tank was eight years old and Gwyneth Paltrow was a judge on apple’s short lived startup show that flopped. I really don’t know how much more obvious it could be that the trend had already jumped the shark in 2017.
This is a good thing, because people were under the mistaken impression that tech talent in SF was uniquely special or good. My theory is that the money and, more vaguely, the inspiration, of the region was infectious to those that were able to come and work there. A sort of mild self-selection but also a privilege open to only a few.
Meanwhile the rest of the world is stuffed full of people who are just as capable of making it at any "cut throat" startup, or starting such companies on their own, but don't live in such an environment where they can make the kinds of connections they need to make to get funding, or aren't getting a huge salary that lets the live comfortably while building personal projects, or the other things that make silicon valley such a hub for this sort of thing.
Hopefully now those effects disperse across the world and we get access to all the wildly different kinds of ideas all across the world. Maybe it'll mean less uber for x, CRM for y, CMS for z type products.