My uninformed opinion of it all is that certain companies have been blessed or anointed by the intelligence agencies for many decades and they've been acting on their behalf every since. Google, Apple, Amazon, Reddit, Microsoft, Elon's stuff, the Telcos and so on. Backdoors, direct access and so on. Same for all the major crypto on/off ramps.
The irony of tech is that reducing friction (such as the Internet making it easy to go to one provider or another) also makes it easy to go straight to the “best”.
By being consistently 0.1% better in the early days, many of these companies earned themselves an unassailable lead. Why go to the little guy when the big guy is big and safe and familiar (yes we at HN don’t operate this way; we aren’t normies and are a minority so we don’t hold sway en masse)
Thanks to a lot of hard work to make great products, big tech has (earned!) market power but still has a mandate from shareholders - and even if not legally required via fiduciary duty it IS the current culture - to find growth at all cost.
When there’s no growth to be had by being nice, but you’re still being told to grow.. well, yeah.
Seems like they mostly stayed the same, just media perception changed once they realized it's more profitable to hate on tech, and safer than hating on established bad industries like Oil and Gas, malpractice in farming, corruption and fraud in politics, whatever is going on in the medical industry.
They still are bringing power to the people. Including people like Musk on this list is frankly ridiculous. Sure the man has issues, but before his takeover of X, it was impossible to say anything online without threats of government intervention for 'wrongspeak'. Yes yes yes, I know there still are government threats for wrongspeak with the new administration, but luckily, no one is going to take down your post right now
They still are bringing power to the people. It just turns out a lot of the media types don't really like the people. And honestly, I can't really blame them... a lot of people are awful. However, if you claim to want to return power to the people, then you should want to return it to all people. Otherwise, just be honest and admit you're a believe in oligarchy and aristocracy -- there is nothing wrong with that; most countries are aristocracies.
Industrial empires naturally have this tendency, once their power level is putting them in the same playground as small states, they become different entities, fighting for their own survival.
The concentration of power of bureaucratic structures, no matter their nature, will always be in tension with individual freedom.
If you are actually looking for an article on "How the Tech World Turned Evil", you are going to be sorely disappointed.
This article is, as you might expect, the usual cast of villains and the usual cast of saviors. The villains only act like villains, and the heroes only act like heroes. Never once are the heroes actions suspect, and never once are the villains actions sympathetic.
If you support the heroes of this article, and your dopamine lights up when your opinions are echoed in a publication, then you may love this article. Having said that, I am sure you have read this same article over and over again in many different forms, I certainly have.
How can anyone look through that list of the author's articles and voluntarily choose to consume this author's writing? It's nothing but partisan extremism.
> The slow death of journalism and consequent dumbing down of the electorate are largely the fault of Section 230
What? The death of print journalism seems to have been due to craigslist killing classified ads and google/doubleclick (and the rest of awful web advertising) killing magazine ads.
The comment about dumbing down the electorate is interesting. How is this measured over time, and according to that measurement how has it varied?
> Once upon a time, they were counterculture idealists bringing power to the people. Today they’re greedy monopolists who’d sooner destroy our democracy than be reined in by government in any way—and they have to be stopped.
What changed? The people in question remain the same. Apparently those people are no longer paying their tithe to the Big Guy, and so the narrative winds have shifted, AFAICT.
The Surveillance Industry has always been evil. This was apparent to anybody who was actually paying attention that since the creation of "web 2.0" - centralized control of everyone's data and software would create an irresistible center of power that would lead nowhere good.
Hence all the feel good marketing slogans like "Don't be evil" and whatnot - to goad individual developers to not think too hard about the direct implications of the technical architectures they were helping to build. And perhaps some of the initial founders even earnestly believed those slogans themselves, and were therefore actually benign or even benevolent. But such concentrated power inevitably attracts the type of people who are most certainly not.
It remains to be seen how much the political pendulum might swing back, but given that Democrats have been acting as controlled opposition for as long as I can remember, I'm not really expecting any sort of brakes any time soon. And pop culture takes still don't seem concerned with individualistically addressing these issues.
So our version of reality is basically set to be the evil corporate-overlord dystopia, and the loosely-connected band of individualist hackers who won't be televised. And Stallman has been thoroughly vindicated. It's time to get your ducks in a row.
the real thing happening is inevitability.
please assume the next bit is written in giant flashing, capitlised letters, in a snazzy font that is printed in some neon ultra violent coulor: all and every technology ever invented has been quickly adapted for the most violent nasty evil use possible, no exceptions.and then there is a leveling up , which tends to reduce and then
end the aysmmetry, but as long as the other monkeys have sharp rocks attached to long sticks, your fucked, then you know that, get pissed, and do the hard thing to level up, because revenge is sweet.
we are at the "hey!, sharp rocks are our idea, no fair! they stole our sharp rocks! there bad!" phase
19 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 41.4 ms ] threadBy being consistently 0.1% better in the early days, many of these companies earned themselves an unassailable lead. Why go to the little guy when the big guy is big and safe and familiar (yes we at HN don’t operate this way; we aren’t normies and are a minority so we don’t hold sway en masse)
Thanks to a lot of hard work to make great products, big tech has (earned!) market power but still has a mandate from shareholders - and even if not legally required via fiduciary duty it IS the current culture - to find growth at all cost.
When there’s no growth to be had by being nice, but you’re still being told to grow.. well, yeah.
They still are bringing power to the people. It just turns out a lot of the media types don't really like the people. And honestly, I can't really blame them... a lot of people are awful. However, if you claim to want to return power to the people, then you should want to return it to all people. Otherwise, just be honest and admit you're a believe in oligarchy and aristocracy -- there is nothing wrong with that; most countries are aristocracies.
The concentration of power of bureaucratic structures, no matter their nature, will always be in tension with individual freedom.
This article is, as you might expect, the usual cast of villains and the usual cast of saviors. The villains only act like villains, and the heroes only act like heroes. Never once are the heroes actions suspect, and never once are the villains actions sympathetic.
If you support the heroes of this article, and your dopamine lights up when your opinions are echoed in a publication, then you may love this article. Having said that, I am sure you have read this same article over and over again in many different forms, I certainly have.
How can anyone look through that list of the author's articles and voluntarily choose to consume this author's writing? It's nothing but partisan extremism.
What? The death of print journalism seems to have been due to craigslist killing classified ads and google/doubleclick (and the rest of awful web advertising) killing magazine ads.
The comment about dumbing down the electorate is interesting. How is this measured over time, and according to that measurement how has it varied?
What changed? The people in question remain the same. Apparently those people are no longer paying their tithe to the Big Guy, and so the narrative winds have shifted, AFAICT.
Hence all the feel good marketing slogans like "Don't be evil" and whatnot - to goad individual developers to not think too hard about the direct implications of the technical architectures they were helping to build. And perhaps some of the initial founders even earnestly believed those slogans themselves, and were therefore actually benign or even benevolent. But such concentrated power inevitably attracts the type of people who are most certainly not.
It remains to be seen how much the political pendulum might swing back, but given that Democrats have been acting as controlled opposition for as long as I can remember, I'm not really expecting any sort of brakes any time soon. And pop culture takes still don't seem concerned with individualistically addressing these issues.
So our version of reality is basically set to be the evil corporate-overlord dystopia, and the loosely-connected band of individualist hackers who won't be televised. And Stallman has been thoroughly vindicated. It's time to get your ducks in a row.