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How Evil Is Tech?

174 points by monsieurpng 9y ago

KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
We've been seeing this type of articles from the New York Times on an almost daily basis recently. Given that the New York Times considers Facebook, Google and Apple as direct threats to its business model, I think the use of words like "evil" in this context is an insult to their readers' intelligence.
- beaner 9y ago
  It's become really easy to see when NYT has decided to push an agenda. The Trump/Russia thing, for a while. "Tech is evil" for a while now, too. It wouldn't be as annoying if they didn't promote themselves as a bastion of truth with marketing lines like "Independent Journalism. More essential than ever." Much of NYT is editorialized storytelling, not independent journalism. Sometimes it's overt, but more often it's subtle by the simple selection of what stories to publish and which to not. I feel like it didn't used to be this way and it has become worse over time.
  - nether 9y ago
    > I feel like it didn't used to be this way and it has become worse over time. It's always been this way. It's just taken you this long to spot it.
  - gaius 9y ago
    They can't not do this. They need the clicks.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Every organization pushes an agenda, independent journalists included. Having an agenda is part of being a person, and that's true even if you genuinely believe in reporting the truth. The people selling themselves as purely objective are the ones lying (even if also to themselves).
  - chickenfries 9y ago
    This is an op ed. By David Brooks.
    - beaner 9y ago
      As per my comment, individual op-eds are not necessarily the problem, it is the curation of various articles fitting a theme across the entire paper by the editorial board.
  - intended 9y ago
    Dear God no. If anything the NYT and other media firms are far behind the curve. No no, they are the children, not the piper in this case. There’s finally been a perfect storm of disasters that even the most tone deaf optimist has to give up and acknowledge what the nay sayers have been saying. Even hacker news, generally one of the more advanced edges of the tech sphere only recently turned on the old narrative. Edit: And this is an op ed, so they’re still behind imo. Edit 2: an actual example is Murdoch - he has repeatedly attacked google etc as destroyers of his revenue.
lacker 9y ago
If you got all your information from this article you would be surprised that, for example, 82% of Americans have a favorable view of Google. It's like the old school media is trying to manufacture negative opinions of the new school. https://www.cnet.com/news/googles-approval-ratings-best-apple-facebook-twitter/ https://www.cnet.com/news/googles-approval-ratings-best-appl...
- theWatcher37 9y ago
  I mean, i’m Extremely hostile towards “old media” and my opinion towards google is highly negative. If anything, there is probably a strong correlation between liking google and trusting old media.
  - thesmallestcat 9y ago
    Why? Because of you and your horse sense?
- edu 9y ago
  Old media has been trying to create a negative image of the new media (internet & videogames) for the last 20 years.
- whyenot 9y ago
  That survey is more than 5 years old. A lot can change in 5 years.
  - oh-kumudo 9y ago
    5 years ago, even HN looks at Google relatively favorably. Proof, Google Reader is still alive at that time, and Google Plus is not there yet. Comparing to now, it is like heaven and hell.
- mindcrime 9y ago
  It's like the old school media is trying to manufacture negative opinions of the new school. It very much feels like this. I mean, maybe I live in a bit of a bubble as a techie, but I just don't see people (even among my very non-techie friends / acquaintances) saying "Wow, WTF is wrong with (Google|Facebook|Amazon|Microsoft|Instagram|Snapchat|Uber|$Whoever)?" OTOH, plenty of those same people are very critical of (CNN|MSNBC|Washington Post|NY Times|Fox News|ABC|NBC|CBS|etc). Honestly, I am starting to feel like this "tech backlash" storyline is fabricated and phony. Dare I say... #FakeNews? :-)
uptownfunk 9y ago
The article brings up three critiques of tech: +Tech is destroying the young via social media +Tech is causing the social media addiction deliberately to profit off of it +Tech giants are monopolies (Apple/Google/Microsoft) that invade privacy and impose unfair conditions on content creators and smaller competitors. Then at the end the author proposes a rebranding of tech: > Imagine if instead of claiming to offer us the best things in life, tech merely saw itself as providing efficiency devices. Its innovations can save us time on lower-level tasks so we can get offline and there experience the best things in life. > Imagine if tech pitched itself that way. That would be an amazing show of realism and, especially, humility, which these days is the ultimate and most disruptive technology. So rebranding is going to make everything right? Who is he writing to, the public or the tech companies? Is he trying to give them advice on how rebrand themselves to appear to be less evil? I can understand his critiques of tech, but his proposed solution falls quite short of the mark!
- icebraining 9y ago
  I think the proposal is for a change of perspective by the people in the tech industry (hence "saw itself"), not just how they brand themselves to the outside, although that would change too. Seems quite naive, though, and considering the source, it strikes me as disingenuous.
blfr 9y ago
The social atomization trend in the west began long before facebooks and googles even existed, before the Internet was available to the general public. They, and Facebook in particular, probably aren't helping but they didn't cause it either. What bothers me the most about these tech giants is the complete about face on free speech. Companies that couldn't exist without it, that couldn't have been founded without the open web (Google) and belief in freedom of communication (Twitter), as bastions of free speech (Reddit) are now busy coming up with new ways to censor their users. This is part of their progressive culture mentioned in the OP but a very specific one. I don't know how many people still care but this is how they lost all my goodwill towards them.
- smsm42 9y ago
  > They, and Facebook in particular, probably aren't helping but they didn't cause it either. Facebook is doing the reverse, if anything. I keep in touch (of various degrees) on FB with people whom I would never keep in touch or even know anything about them without it. Yeah, of course, I could write letters. But who actually does it? Nobody would do it.
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    There are other means. People wrote letters in the past. Called you on the phone. Sent SMS. Sent email. Communicated on forums. Used chat programs and video conferencing. Facebook has no monopoly on social networking, fortunately. Heck, HN is a social site and I see no ads. Server costs are super low. The only problem is search engines ran by advertisers having major sway. While Google etc. are investing quite a bit into networking, that is boot strictly necessary even for sites of this magnitude. Nor very expensive, which is why they are profiting a lot.
    - smsm42 9y ago
      HN is not the kind of social site Facebook is. You don't post you dogs pics and your kids and the funny mushroom you found on yesterday's hike on HN (and yeah, people do that all the time and they want to do it).
markbnj 9y ago
> Their technologies are extremely useful for the tasks and pleasures that require shallower forms of consciousness, but they often crowd out and destroy the deeper forms of consciousness people need to thrive. Boy that's a hell of a label to stick on all the technology produced by Google, Facebook and Apple. How do you even get all three of those companies into one bucket without just making it a stupidly big bucket? One is a search and advertising company with a bunch of side business, another is an innovative hardware company with a bunch of side businesses, and the third is an addictive social network. They're all "tech" and they're destroying our deeper consciousness? Ok.
- confounded 9y ago
  Any specific counter-arguments? I work for one of them, and it sounds about right to me.
  - otalp 9y ago
    Apple doesn't care too much about how long you use an iPhone everyday as long as you buy one every year or so. Facebook and Google's entire business model relies on you spending a lot of time on their services. It's inaccurate to put them in the same bucket.
    - chickenfries 9y ago
      Apple cares very much what kind of software you run on your iPhone. Also, Apple news is a competitor to google and the web. You don’t deny that google and Facebook are both similar and are basically media companies themselves. Seems like you’re getting hung up on a relatively minor detail.
    - confounded 9y ago
      It’s true that unlike Facebook and Google, Apple is primarily a B2C company. However, aside from their own dark-UI patterns and walled garden strategy, Facebook and Google provide the killer apps for Apple’s highest margin product. And Apple absolutely do care about engagement on the iPhone; it’s highly predictive of buying a new one every year.
HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
I dunno, how evil is the media?
beaner 9y ago
I feel like none of the problems described are really symptoms of Big Tech, they're more symptoms of technology itself along with the fact that we haven't yet adjusted to it psychologically as a species. None of the problems that the author describes are problems that would not be there if "Big Tech" didn't exist and were replaced by decentralized systems or other alternatives. I think the author missed a really good opportunity to explore the developing relationship between the human psyche and the overflow of information that this age has provided us with, and instead made it political and blamey.
- confounded 9y ago
  I’m not so sure the role of what we’ve let become called “tech” is as neutral and inevitable as you make out. There’s nothing about the technology behind the Internet that means that ad-surveillance needs to be its default business model, for example.
  - beaner 9y ago
    Yeah, there's not a law, but I think if we had started in any other model we'd've still ended up here. Information is cheap and fast. This makes it difficult to charge for most content. The only way to do this and profit is to advertise. Competition among ad networks leads to ad tracking because it results in higher revenue for publishers.
    - AstralStorm 9y ago
      Correction: only commonly available information. Want to get latest research of high value that is not a patent? Get double dipped by Elsevier. And IEEE. And ISO committee. Or pay for good online courses. Likewise with common services. Social chat app number 1001 has little value. Highly integrated with your business? Now you pay. Unfortunately for news sites, their information is commonly available. Apps are fungible and it is easy to develop "good enough" nowadays.
- icebraining 9y ago
  I disagree; incentives matter, and when one earns more by promoting harmful behaviors, that's what many will do. They mention the example of Snapstreak, which is designed to keep you plugged in; that's not a symptom of technology, but a symptom of the economic model of the group of people developing it.
otalp 9y ago
1)Comparing the tech industry's effects to the tobacco industry is a bad joke. 2)Of course monopolies exist in tech and are bad, but that's the nature of the protectionist state capitalism in the US over the last few decades, and is not restricted to technology alone. Unfortunately corporations have more influence on the working of the government than the people, and we're now into an era of unprecedented corporate mergers and monopolies. 3)"Imagine if instead of claiming to offer us the best things in life, tech merely saw itself as providing efficiency devices. Its innovations can save us time on lower-level tasks so we can get offline and there experience the best things in life." That's what a lot of companies do. Apple and Microsoft market themselves as selling productivity devices that help you get work done quicker. Jony Ive is on record saying that people use iPhones too much. It's also not reasonable to sweep in hardware companies like Apple, who don't particularly care how much time you spend using their products as long as you buy them regularly, to facebook, who very much care about how long you spend on their site, since this is inherently linked to their profitability. What are facebook going to do, encourage people to log off so that they can live happy lives while facebook's profits decline? The purpose of a corporation is to maximise profits, you cannot expect companies which compete in the attention economy to compromise on that even if their services are addictive and not useful to the people who use them or productive to society. If you really think monopolies and corporations like facebook are harming humans without offering any competing benefits, you'd have to question the whole system of corporate capitalism and whether we should allow corporations freedom to function without public influence over their activities.
- confounded 9y ago
  > ... whether we should allow corporations freedom to function without public influence over their activities. We don’t.
  - otalp 9y ago
    The vast majority of people support net neutrality. Yet ISPs have supported and successfully lobbied it's repeal. Do people have influence over them? In case of monopolies, or essential monopolies, the public has virtually no influence on what a corporation does.
confounded 9y ago
Using the word “tech” to describe the business practices of unregulated monopolies is really starting to grind on me. It’s not necessarily journalists’ fault; that’s the term these companies have used to market themselves for years. We (the engineering classes / actual technologists) need to do more to brighten the line between the technology and the motivations and incentives of the people putting up the capital (and the executives/lawyers/lobbyists they control). And, possibly, to recognize our latent power to influence certain decisions.
- chillydawg 9y ago
  I'd wager you have zero power in your organisation to I fluence corporate structure and tax policy. If you do, I then wager your organisation is so small that it doesn't matter. And the same goes for effectively everyone.
  - confounded 9y ago
    The question then becomes do they need us more than we need them? I’d argue that the answer is yes. The key is organizing collectively. I previously thought this was extremely unlikely. But a lot of the happy-clappy veneer seems to be coming off on the inside. Even this week with net neutrality, (within my tech-monopoly) the number of people who want to do something and are pissed off with: ”you don’t understand technology policy, monkeys; we have lobbyists, do anything and get fired” ... coming down from the top, is much larger than I’d expected.
    - Singletoned 9y ago
      > The key is organizing collectively. The key is collectively agreeing on something. After that, everything else is an implementation detail.
- lucas_membrane 9y ago
  > the people putting up the capital If you look at the balance sheets of many very profitable software/service companies, particularly those that use the cloud but do not provide the cloud, you will see that the concept of 'capital' is not what most think it is. There are almost no physical assets there to justify calling the system 'capitalist.' The rate of return (free cash flow) on assets is astronomical. For example, I have recently worked for a firm in which the assets and annual return to shareholders were each equal to about 2 months of revenue. And most of the assets are either cash equivalents that the 'capitalists' have simply squirreled away out of past earnings, or agreed-upon fictions like deferred costs or goodwill, or monopoly rights (intellectual property) created by the government for the corporations. This is not to say that successful entrepreneurs do not have extraordinary talents at what Barnum called "money-getting." But it is hard to call someone who starts a firm for $1,000.00 in his garage and sells it for 10 figures, or someone controlling a similar firm who has already recovered his initial investment 100,000 times over, or a hired-gun employee slash-and-burn CEO who is given a few million in shares to motivate more money-getting, a 'capitalist.' Especially since the $1,000.00 probably went for things like telephone and answering services, stationary, advertising, legal fees of getting set-up, or finding a first customer, which are expenses, not capital, and none of which are recorded in the firms capital accounts. Our respect for capitalism is so overblown that we take it as given that any making of unimaginable amounts of money by means that no one understands is an example of 'capitalism,' because if it were not, the reverence for capitalism would be called into question.
lowglow 9y ago
I wonder how many commenters here work for/with big tech.
- chickenfries 9y ago
  Amazing that this is downvoted while all the other points are accusing David Brooks of... shilling for the nyt? I dunno
mephitix 9y ago
My humble, personal opinion that I have been reluctant to share: I am embarrassed by what has become of some parts of the industry I love. For as much as Silicon Valley professes that it wants to "make the world a better place", you can also find - social media websites that feed on people's addictions, almost forcing them to post and share as much as they can instead of simply enjoying moments in their lives. - the proliferation of fake news; this one stings a lot. When I was younger the internet seemed like such an incredible learning tool. Many years later, walled gardens driven by algorithms intent on feeding narcissistic tendencies allow people to fall deeply into their own confirmation bias. This is a kind of 'anti-learning' that has developed out of FUD that is only getting propagated throughout all these social networks. - big tech companies where employees are sold on "making the world a better place" but instead become completely dependent on attaining fake labels like "senior engineer" - and yet have never actually talked to a single user. - games that are no longer fun, but are now environments deliberately set up to trap users in their own Skinner Boxes, pulling levers and pushing buttons to open loot boxes that slowly drain out their bank accounts - the outright denial of many people in the tech industry that any of the above is a problem. Simply read through the comments on this HN page. Identifying that any of these things are problems is the first step in fixing them.
- haberman 9y ago
  I can say that I'm much more receptive to hearing this from someone in the industry (like you) than to hear one industry pointing fingers at another. The news industry invented the 24 hour news cycle, and the exploiting people's fear and outrage to keep their attention fixed on all of the worst, link-baity events that happen every day. The article talks about Eighth Graders and how 10 hours a week online makes them less happy; what about people who spend that much time watching the news? I'd wager that a lot of the negative feelings people get from spending too much time online come from reading too much news (and social media reactions to news). This creates an unfounded feeling that the world is falling apart compared to how it was 10 or 20 years ago, when by most objective measures the world is getting better. So I can acknowledge that there are problems, while simultaneously feeling a bit unwilling to be demonized in this way by the New York Times.
wpietri 9y ago
I am torn between my desire to see the numerous legitimate criticisms of the tech industry given deeper consideration and irritation at the eternally lazy way David "Applebee's salad bar" Brooks tackles anything. The "destroying the young" thing is especially tiresome. Every new thing has been destroying the young. That's true at least as far back as the novel [1], and probably back to prehistory when elders complained that fire was making kids soft, what with their "cooking" and their "warmth". It's also deeply self-defeating of him to be complaining about the lack of "cohesion" and "focused attention" in a sub-1000-word opinion piece that tries to make a half-dozen points, none particularly well. And all that in a daily newspaper, which is built to contain small amount of a great variety of things, and which makes a lot of its money from distracting its readers with ads. [2] [1] e.g, point 4 of http://mentalfloss.com/article/52209/15-historical-complaints-about-young-people-ruining-everything http://mentalfloss.com/article/52209/15-historical-complaint... and https://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/when-novels-were-bad-for-you/ https://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/when-novels-wer... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/business/media/new-york-times-earnings.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/business/media/new-york-t...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- notacoward 9y ago
  > the eternally lazy way David "Applebee's salad bar" Brooks tackles anything. Which leads to the question: how evil is David Brooks? How much of our time has he wasted? How many minds has he warped? How many Evil Empire agenda items has he helped to push? I'd say very few in tech have done as much harm as he has.
ab89b176cb5d 9y ago
"Tech" is not technology. Nobody hates TCP/IP or neural networks. What people rightly fear is unaccountable power held by software companies. If you are an engineer, you can help by respecting the people who use what you build. Show people the content they want to see, not the content that maximizes revenue. Refuse to experiment and collect data without the informed consent of the people you target. Build systems with the knowledge that every centralized service will eventually be compromised. Even if it's harder to build, harder to debug, and harder to monetize, build technology that is "good" instead of "evil" and the world will be better off.
zaarn 9y ago
>The first is that it is destroying the young. >The second critique of the tech industry is that it is causing [...] addiction on purpose, to make money >The third critique is that Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook are near monopolies that use their market power to invade the private lives of their users and impose unfair conditions on content creators and smaller competitors I agree with all three of these, though I think this is fixable. They obvious and easy solution is to pick apart the giants. The EU's ePrivacy Law and GDPR make this possible, in addition to Germany's NdG making it difficult for large social network to operate compared to small ones. The solution, in my opinions, is federated networks like Mastodon. Mastodon Server Operators have little incentive to abuse their users since the users will happily just swarm to another instance. Once they have figured out portable profiles, this becomes even easier. Federation solves these problems by detaching the user from a specific operator.
- thanatropism 9y ago
  Mastodon is one technical solution -- it makes me think of space exploration through Lagrange points. But have you figured out how to make it an actual solution?
  - zaarn 9y ago
    I'm working on solutions as a side project and there are other projects in the space too. All it takes is for one of them to succeed.
hjorthjort 9y ago
There is a lot of statistics about how social media causes depression/unhappiness in the article. But I didn't see sources, and from what I can tell (without looking at the studies) it's just a correlation. I do believe social media impacts depression rates and creates some unhappiness, but the claims in the article seem unsupported. Surely, depressed kids would have spent more time alone in all ages, hanging out in their room, watching TV, maybe reading. Honestly, even if social media made you HAPPIER, I'd expect unhappy eight graders to spend more time on social media than those with a sunnier disposition.
oh-kumudo 9y ago
Very evil apparently. Tech is the greediest industry at this point, even comparing with Wall Street, all under the philosophy of GROWTH. Too many pretentious people get into this industry to chase the hot money, it slowly degrades to this toxic, selfish, out of touch culture, that benefits no one except the tech people and their pocket. Worst of all, they lack the blessing of self-consciousness to see it. Tech is changing the world, but it probably not making the world a better place.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  Real means now needed is material progress. Energy progress. Fixing backwards places in the world. Political progress. Ecological and economical too. Medical perhaps. Apparently this is not quick buck enough. Information revolution can only go so far. Many of the alleged tech companies are not innovative at all.
- jgh 9y ago
  Couldn't agree more. Similarly with the commenter who has been voted to the top. The tech industry isn't a great look right now.
pgl 9y ago
I think the question should really be, "How Evil Are The People In Control Of Tech?"
palad1n 9y ago
>Imagine if instead of claiming to offer us the best things in life, tech merely saw itself as providing efficiency devices. Hear hear.
TrickyRick 9y ago
Does make me wonder, will we look back at this time of unregulated tech companies and social media in 50 years the way we look back at unregulated sale and advertisement of tobacco today?
- platinumrad 9y ago
  I honestly find "tech" to be way too broad of a label and only really see major problems with social media and fintech. Juciero-type companies are stupid, sure, but they're not hurting anyone. Instagram and Twitter, on the other hand, are likely strong net negatives for society. Edit: Microtransaction-based games that are essentially gambling simulators are highly problematic as well.
  - TrickyRick 9y ago
    Yeah, I guess that unlike the tobacco industry there are actually parts of this industry that do something positive for the world. Perhaps Big Social is a better term, or Big Gaming (AKA the AAA Industry...) depending on what problem you want to focus on.
gerardnll 9y ago
What's evil are the minds behind the tech.
- diyseguy 9y ago
  They were cultivated by a system that encourages them to treat life as a game where money is the points that decides who wins. Human values like ethics are pesky speedbumps that get in the way of maximizing greed.
dredmorbius 9y ago
Addressing a few points raised in comments: 1. The drumbeat of criticism against major information-technology-centric, largely media-based firms, has been palpably increasing. As a long-term critic, this is oddly disconcerting. Calls for regulation are increasing in the US and elsewhere. Critics include numerous former (and some current) employees, or executives, of major tech companies, including Sean Parker, former president of Facebook. 2. The dynamics and interactions of media, the public, tribalistic impulses, and politics (as well as other phenomena) are an ancient study, though one apparently not much focused on by many working in information technology: programmers, system architects, sysadmins, DBAs, network engineers, designers, UI/UX specialists, product managers, etc. Which is ironic because that really is our melieu. There's a very large literature on this topic and I very much recommend getting up to speed on the topic. MOOC ICS has a good, fast-paced introduction. I've been commenting on HN and elsewhere of my own explorations: Robert McChesny, Noam Chomsky, I.F. Stone, Marshall McLuhan, H.L. Mencken, Walter Lippmann, Gustav la Bon, Davic MacKay, Cicero, Aristotle, and Plato are among the authors I'd recommend. First video (apologies, I cannot find the playlist link): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhGPbjxy2F8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhGPbjxy2F8 3. "Technology" is a tremendously unsatisfactory term for the many meanings and connotations we give it. It's become synonymous in large part with "inforamtion technology" (though writ broadly it concerns far more). But if you do look at information technology, that field can largely be divided in two: media, directed at collecting and directing information from and to people, and cybernetics, directed at monitoring and managing non-human systems (including technical, engineering, financial, and governmental systems). Looking at each of these more closely even those distinctions start disappearing over the underlying similarities. But the upshot is that a tremendous amount of what "technology" is is really the new "media". And yes, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Wordpress, Spotify, Snapchat, and similar companies are largely media or communications companies in the same sense that Western Union, AT&T, RCA, CNN, or Time-Life Publishing, are. But bigger, faster, and with orders of magnitude more audience. And the less-directly-media-oriented companies -- Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft -- still have media-like components, though they play in other spaces as well. 4. The current tech giants didn't invent disinformation, misinformation, distraction, propaganda, and manipulation. But they've made it vastly more powerful, targeted, sophisticated, large, and rapidly-evolving. They've also denied this up and down and blue for years, with all the credibility of the lead, asbestos, tobacco, automobile, CFC, coal, and oil industries. Which is to say: nil. Not inventing a problem doesn't mean you're not embodying or exacerbating it.
yannis7 9y ago
just another attempt by the witch-hunting media trash to portray tech people as the "new bankers". it is amazing how similar those "respectable" metropolitan left-wing newspapers are to their populist-right counterparts: for the latter "immigrants are gonna take your jobs and globalists are evil" and the former "robots are gonna take your jobs and techies are evil".
megaman22 9y ago
Literally my job is to make software that increases productivity, in a blatantly Taylorist sense, for a segment of business that is almost universally considered a cost center. More throughput with less people, and ideally the software enables using the cheapest people possible. I'm tasked with creating metrics that line-managers can use to drive their workers like oarslaves on a corsair galley. In a perfect world, from the business' perspective, I'd utterly replace the people with some conglomeration of AI buzzwords that could do the job at 65% of the efficiency of a human, at less than the cost of one minimum wage salary.
Nicholas7900 9y ago
Hacking a phone or a computer does not depend on programming language, but exploit the existing vulnerabilities. If you mean by create Windows virus/trojan/malware, them are generally written in Visual C++ (VC++), and you can learn it by buying books for basic knowledge and go to practice. so i think adrian lamo uses c plus or v plus for hacking. I don't know why every one talk about Nicholas Shields, I'm not the only Hacker online, but if you like to know what hackers use i can tell you , to hacking web site for example you need script python or Perl or ruby ... but its not the important part because first you should know what you will do and then it will be easy because maybe you will found some code in the internet like here Exploits Database by Offensive Security , so there is a different between someone who hack by using tools and code already done and someone who found "zero days" bugs and expel hacking. Well, if you wish to contact me for hacking issues : compositehacks@gmail.com
skrebbel 9y ago
Somewhat a tangent, but "How evil is tech" is a nice Trumpian headline. Looks like NYT is catching up with the times. By formulating is like this, NYT implies that everybody agrees that "tech" is evil to some extent, and that the only discussion is about exactly how evil "tech" is. Don't forget that NYT is in pretty direct competition with some companies they call "tech". This article is not unlike Coca-Cola publishing a press release titled "How evil is Pepsi?". (Note, I did not share any opinion about whether "tech" is evil and I don't necessarily disagree with the premise of the article. I'm just trying to highlight that this kind of writing appears to be the new baseline and it's not just fake news and the alt right who do it anymore and that bothers the crap out of me because I feel like I can't trust anyone anymore)
- Ygg2 9y ago
  > "How evil is tech" is a nice Trumpian headline. Looks like NYT is catching up with the times. What makes you think it needed to catch up at all? Look, press/media, tech, and any industry out there are there to "Make world a better place... for themselves".
  - meebs 9y ago
    > any industry out there are there to "Make world a better place... for themselves". Under capitalism, at least. :)
microcolonel 9y ago
I swear, if 00s and 10s Silicon Valley ruins the freedoms enjoyed by the computing industry by being short-sighted, it will be the greatest grudge I hold in life.
oldandtired 9y ago
Technology of any kind is not inherently evil, not guns, computers, genetic manipulation, not even nuclear bombs. Evil only arises when man uses and formulates technology for evil purposes. Too often, people get "a bee in their bonnets" over some form of technology when it is abused and misused by other people. They don't separate the tool from the tool user and associate evil with the tool. Sometimes there is a case for not developing some form of technology because the development requires the destruction and damage to people and the environment. Here the problem is still people not the technology itself.
- ndh2 9y ago
  This is a bit of a slippery slope. Take gas chambers for example. We all know what they were designed to do, and what they were used to. So was it ok to design them, because only those who used them were at fault? Was it ok to build them? Was it ok to execute the command of pushing the button, because you didn't issue the command? Who's at fault here? Why is it ok to design and build algorithms that make people unhappy?
  - TulliusCicero 9y ago
    I mean, how much harm has to be done before some tech is unethical? Take World of Warcraft, for instance: no one will dispute that the game was designed to keep you playing a very long time, and that many players were (are) addicted and wasted an excessive amount of time on the game, many people lost jobs, got kicked out of school, even ended marriages. That's real damage. But, many people also simply enjoyed the game, spent time with friends, one of my old school buddies even found his wife playing the game. So, was creating WoW an unethical move on the developers' part?
  - vorpalhex 9y ago
    Before the gas chamber was the firing squad. Before that was the noose, the axe, and the guillotine. Humans have a long history of killing each other, and typically over time (with a few exceptions such as the electric chair) the methods have generally gotten more humane (if state sanctioned punishment resulting in death can ever be considered humane) and when those methods failed to be available, no human government has ever held off on using a more barbaric act of killing in it's place. Technology will either evolve without us, or less humane methods will continue to be used. Progress is both a promise and a threat.
JudasGoat 9y ago
Has anyone thought of making a nanny type app that would set "healthy limits" on time spent on social media and news. I don't think we can rely on facebook to tell users what is healthy, when it is unhealthy to their revenue.
jondubois 9y ago
Most big tech companies are evil to some extent though they also do some good too. I've worked for a few and I can rarely stick around for longer than 6 months. It just doesn't feel right to me. It's obviously a zero-sum game. It feels like executives are slowly turning the knobs and making companies more and more evil over time but doing so at a slow enough rate that nobody pays attention to it. The hypocrisy of some big companies is that they promote themselves as being against any form of violence, aggression or discrimination but a large part of their business is about mentally abusing people and creating inequality.
diyseguy 9y ago
meh. individuals will eventually figure it out for themselves. we don't need nannies. something tells me this sort of argument will get used to prop up anti net neutrality arguments.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
foxhop 9y ago
I ranted a couple days ago about the evils of what has become of cryptocurrency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15746019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15746019

174 points by monsieurpng 9y ago

We've been seeing this type of articles from the New York Times on an almost daily basis recently. Given that the New York Times considers Facebook, Google and Apple as direct threats to its business model, I think the use of words like "evil" in this context is an insult to their readers' intelligence.

beaner 9y ago
It's become really easy to see when NYT has decided to push an agenda. The Trump/Russia thing, for a while. "Tech is evil" for a while now, too. It wouldn't be as annoying if they didn't promote themselves as a bastion of truth with marketing lines like "Independent Journalism. More essential than ever." Much of NYT is editorialized storytelling, not independent journalism. Sometimes it's overt, but more often it's subtle by the simple selection of what stories to publish and which to not. I feel like it didn't used to be this way and it has become worse over time.
- nether 9y ago
  > I feel like it didn't used to be this way and it has become worse over time. It's always been this way. It's just taken you this long to spot it.
- gaius 9y ago
  They can't not do this. They need the clicks.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Every organization pushes an agenda, independent journalists included. Having an agenda is part of being a person, and that's true even if you genuinely believe in reporting the truth. The people selling themselves as purely objective are the ones lying (even if also to themselves).
- chickenfries 9y ago
  This is an op ed. By David Brooks.
  - beaner 9y ago
    As per my comment, individual op-eds are not necessarily the problem, it is the curation of various articles fitting a theme across the entire paper by the editorial board.
- intended 9y ago
  Dear God no. If anything the NYT and other media firms are far behind the curve. No no, they are the children, not the piper in this case. There’s finally been a perfect storm of disasters that even the most tone deaf optimist has to give up and acknowledge what the nay sayers have been saying. Even hacker news, generally one of the more advanced edges of the tech sphere only recently turned on the old narrative. Edit: And this is an op ed, so they’re still behind imo. Edit 2: an actual example is Murdoch - he has repeatedly attacked google etc as destroyers of his revenue.

lacker 9y ago

If you got all your information from this article you would be surprised that, for example, 82% of Americans have a favorable view of Google. It's like the old school media is trying to manufacture negative opinions of the new school. https://www.cnet.com/news/googles-approval-ratings-best-apple-facebook-twitter/ https://www.cnet.com/news/googles-approval-ratings-best-appl...

theWatcher37 9y ago
I mean, i’m Extremely hostile towards “old media” and my opinion towards google is highly negative. If anything, there is probably a strong correlation between liking google and trusting old media.
- thesmallestcat 9y ago
  Why? Because of you and your horse sense?
edu 9y ago
Old media has been trying to create a negative image of the new media (internet & videogames) for the last 20 years.
whyenot 9y ago
That survey is more than 5 years old. A lot can change in 5 years.
- oh-kumudo 9y ago
  5 years ago, even HN looks at Google relatively favorably. Proof, Google Reader is still alive at that time, and Google Plus is not there yet. Comparing to now, it is like heaven and hell.
mindcrime 9y ago
It's like the old school media is trying to manufacture negative opinions of the new school. It very much feels like this. I mean, maybe I live in a bit of a bubble as a techie, but I just don't see people (even among my very non-techie friends / acquaintances) saying "Wow, WTF is wrong with (Google|Facebook|Amazon|Microsoft|Instagram|Snapchat|Uber|$Whoever)?" OTOH, plenty of those same people are very critical of (CNN|MSNBC|Washington Post|NY Times|Fox News|ABC|NBC|CBS|etc). Honestly, I am starting to feel like this "tech backlash" storyline is fabricated and phony. Dare I say... #FakeNews? :-)

uptownfunk 9y ago

The article brings up three critiques of tech: +Tech is destroying the young via social media +Tech is causing the social media addiction deliberately to profit off of it +Tech giants are monopolies (Apple/Google/Microsoft) that invade privacy and impose unfair conditions on content creators and smaller competitors. Then at the end the author proposes a rebranding of tech: > Imagine if instead of claiming to offer us the best things in life, tech merely saw itself as providing efficiency devices. Its innovations can save us time on lower-level tasks so we can get offline and there experience the best things in life. > Imagine if tech pitched itself that way. That would be an amazing show of realism and, especially, humility, which these days is the ultimate and most disruptive technology. So rebranding is going to make everything right? Who is he writing to, the public or the tech companies? Is he trying to give them advice on how rebrand themselves to appear to be less evil? I can understand his critiques of tech, but his proposed solution falls quite short of the mark!

icebraining 9y ago
I think the proposal is for a change of perspective by the people in the tech industry (hence "saw itself"), not just how they brand themselves to the outside, although that would change too. Seems quite naive, though, and considering the source, it strikes me as disingenuous.

blfr 9y ago

The social atomization trend in the west began long before facebooks and googles even existed, before the Internet was available to the general public. They, and Facebook in particular, probably aren't helping but they didn't cause it either. What bothers me the most about these tech giants is the complete about face on free speech. Companies that couldn't exist without it, that couldn't have been founded without the open web (Google) and belief in freedom of communication (Twitter), as bastions of free speech (Reddit) are now busy coming up with new ways to censor their users. This is part of their progressive culture mentioned in the OP but a very specific one. I don't know how many people still care but this is how they lost all my goodwill towards them.

smsm42 9y ago
> They, and Facebook in particular, probably aren't helping but they didn't cause it either. Facebook is doing the reverse, if anything. I keep in touch (of various degrees) on FB with people whom I would never keep in touch or even know anything about them without it. Yeah, of course, I could write letters. But who actually does it? Nobody would do it.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  There are other means. People wrote letters in the past. Called you on the phone. Sent SMS. Sent email. Communicated on forums. Used chat programs and video conferencing. Facebook has no monopoly on social networking, fortunately. Heck, HN is a social site and I see no ads. Server costs are super low. The only problem is search engines ran by advertisers having major sway. While Google etc. are investing quite a bit into networking, that is boot strictly necessary even for sites of this magnitude. Nor very expensive, which is why they are profiting a lot.
  - smsm42 9y ago
    HN is not the kind of social site Facebook is. You don't post you dogs pics and your kids and the funny mushroom you found on yesterday's hike on HN (and yeah, people do that all the time and they want to do it).

markbnj 9y ago

> Their technologies are extremely useful for the tasks and pleasures that require shallower forms of consciousness, but they often crowd out and destroy the deeper forms of consciousness people need to thrive. Boy that's a hell of a label to stick on all the technology produced by Google, Facebook and Apple. How do you even get all three of those companies into one bucket without just making it a stupidly big bucket? One is a search and advertising company with a bunch of side business, another is an innovative hardware company with a bunch of side businesses, and the third is an addictive social network. They're all "tech" and they're destroying our deeper consciousness? Ok.

confounded 9y ago
Any specific counter-arguments? I work for one of them, and it sounds about right to me.
- otalp 9y ago
  Apple doesn't care too much about how long you use an iPhone everyday as long as you buy one every year or so. Facebook and Google's entire business model relies on you spending a lot of time on their services. It's inaccurate to put them in the same bucket.
  - chickenfries 9y ago
    Apple cares very much what kind of software you run on your iPhone. Also, Apple news is a competitor to google and the web. You don’t deny that google and Facebook are both similar and are basically media companies themselves. Seems like you’re getting hung up on a relatively minor detail.
  - confounded 9y ago
    It’s true that unlike Facebook and Google, Apple is primarily a B2C company. However, aside from their own dark-UI patterns and walled garden strategy, Facebook and Google provide the killer apps for Apple’s highest margin product. And Apple absolutely do care about engagement on the iPhone; it’s highly predictive of buying a new one every year.

HumanDrivenDev 9y ago

I dunno, how evil is the media?

beaner 9y ago

I feel like none of the problems described are really symptoms of Big Tech, they're more symptoms of technology itself along with the fact that we haven't yet adjusted to it psychologically as a species. None of the problems that the author describes are problems that would not be there if "Big Tech" didn't exist and were replaced by decentralized systems or other alternatives. I think the author missed a really good opportunity to explore the developing relationship between the human psyche and the overflow of information that this age has provided us with, and instead made it political and blamey.

confounded 9y ago
I’m not so sure the role of what we’ve let become called “tech” is as neutral and inevitable as you make out. There’s nothing about the technology behind the Internet that means that ad-surveillance needs to be its default business model, for example.
- beaner 9y ago
  Yeah, there's not a law, but I think if we had started in any other model we'd've still ended up here. Information is cheap and fast. This makes it difficult to charge for most content. The only way to do this and profit is to advertise. Competition among ad networks leads to ad tracking because it results in higher revenue for publishers.
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    Correction: only commonly available information. Want to get latest research of high value that is not a patent? Get double dipped by Elsevier. And IEEE. And ISO committee. Or pay for good online courses. Likewise with common services. Social chat app number 1001 has little value. Highly integrated with your business? Now you pay. Unfortunately for news sites, their information is commonly available. Apps are fungible and it is easy to develop "good enough" nowadays.
icebraining 9y ago
I disagree; incentives matter, and when one earns more by promoting harmful behaviors, that's what many will do. They mention the example of Snapstreak, which is designed to keep you plugged in; that's not a symptom of technology, but a symptom of the economic model of the group of people developing it.

otalp 9y ago

1)Comparing the tech industry's effects to the tobacco industry is a bad joke. 2)Of course monopolies exist in tech and are bad, but that's the nature of the protectionist state capitalism in the US over the last few decades, and is not restricted to technology alone. Unfortunately corporations have more influence on the working of the government than the people, and we're now into an era of unprecedented corporate mergers and monopolies. 3)"Imagine if instead of claiming to offer us the best things in life, tech merely saw itself as providing efficiency devices. Its innovations can save us time on lower-level tasks so we can get offline and there experience the best things in life." That's what a lot of companies do. Apple and Microsoft market themselves as selling productivity devices that help you get work done quicker. Jony Ive is on record saying that people use iPhones too much. It's also not reasonable to sweep in hardware companies like Apple, who don't particularly care how much time you spend using their products as long as you buy them regularly, to facebook, who very much care about how long you spend on their site, since this is inherently linked to their profitability. What are facebook going to do, encourage people to log off so that they can live happy lives while facebook's profits decline? The purpose of a corporation is to maximise profits, you cannot expect companies which compete in the attention economy to compromise on that even if their services are addictive and not useful to the people who use them or productive to society. If you really think monopolies and corporations like facebook are harming humans without offering any competing benefits, you'd have to question the whole system of corporate capitalism and whether we should allow corporations freedom to function without public influence over their activities.

confounded 9y ago
> ... whether we should allow corporations freedom to function without public influence over their activities. We don’t.
- otalp 9y ago
  The vast majority of people support net neutrality. Yet ISPs have supported and successfully lobbied it's repeal. Do people have influence over them? In case of monopolies, or essential monopolies, the public has virtually no influence on what a corporation does.

confounded 9y ago

Using the word “tech” to describe the business practices of unregulated monopolies is really starting to grind on me. It’s not necessarily journalists’ fault; that’s the term these companies have used to market themselves for years. We (the engineering classes / actual technologists) need to do more to brighten the line between the technology and the motivations and incentives of the people putting up the capital (and the executives/lawyers/lobbyists they control). And, possibly, to recognize our latent power to influence certain decisions.

chillydawg 9y ago
I'd wager you have zero power in your organisation to I fluence corporate structure and tax policy. If you do, I then wager your organisation is so small that it doesn't matter. And the same goes for effectively everyone.
- confounded 9y ago
  The question then becomes do they need us more than we need them? I’d argue that the answer is yes. The key is organizing collectively. I previously thought this was extremely unlikely. But a lot of the happy-clappy veneer seems to be coming off on the inside. Even this week with net neutrality, (within my tech-monopoly) the number of people who want to do something and are pissed off with: ”you don’t understand technology policy, monkeys; we have lobbyists, do anything and get fired” ... coming down from the top, is much larger than I’d expected.
  - Singletoned 9y ago
    > The key is organizing collectively. The key is collectively agreeing on something. After that, everything else is an implementation detail.
lucas_membrane 9y ago
> the people putting up the capital If you look at the balance sheets of many very profitable software/service companies, particularly those that use the cloud but do not provide the cloud, you will see that the concept of 'capital' is not what most think it is. There are almost no physical assets there to justify calling the system 'capitalist.' The rate of return (free cash flow) on assets is astronomical. For example, I have recently worked for a firm in which the assets and annual return to shareholders were each equal to about 2 months of revenue. And most of the assets are either cash equivalents that the 'capitalists' have simply squirreled away out of past earnings, or agreed-upon fictions like deferred costs or goodwill, or monopoly rights (intellectual property) created by the government for the corporations. This is not to say that successful entrepreneurs do not have extraordinary talents at what Barnum called "money-getting." But it is hard to call someone who starts a firm for $1,000.00 in his garage and sells it for 10 figures, or someone controlling a similar firm who has already recovered his initial investment 100,000 times over, or a hired-gun employee slash-and-burn CEO who is given a few million in shares to motivate more money-getting, a 'capitalist.' Especially since the $1,000.00 probably went for things like telephone and answering services, stationary, advertising, legal fees of getting set-up, or finding a first customer, which are expenses, not capital, and none of which are recorded in the firms capital accounts. Our respect for capitalism is so overblown that we take it as given that any making of unimaginable amounts of money by means that no one understands is an example of 'capitalism,' because if it were not, the reverence for capitalism would be called into question.

lowglow 9y ago

I wonder how many commenters here work for/with big tech.

chickenfries 9y ago
Amazing that this is downvoted while all the other points are accusing David Brooks of... shilling for the nyt? I dunno

mephitix 9y ago

My humble, personal opinion that I have been reluctant to share: I am embarrassed by what has become of some parts of the industry I love. For as much as Silicon Valley professes that it wants to "make the world a better place", you can also find - social media websites that feed on people's addictions, almost forcing them to post and share as much as they can instead of simply enjoying moments in their lives. - the proliferation of fake news; this one stings a lot. When I was younger the internet seemed like such an incredible learning tool. Many years later, walled gardens driven by algorithms intent on feeding narcissistic tendencies allow people to fall deeply into their own confirmation bias. This is a kind of 'anti-learning' that has developed out of FUD that is only getting propagated throughout all these social networks. - big tech companies where employees are sold on "making the world a better place" but instead become completely dependent on attaining fake labels like "senior engineer" - and yet have never actually talked to a single user. - games that are no longer fun, but are now environments deliberately set up to trap users in their own Skinner Boxes, pulling levers and pushing buttons to open loot boxes that slowly drain out their bank accounts - the outright denial of many people in the tech industry that any of the above is a problem. Simply read through the comments on this HN page. Identifying that any of these things are problems is the first step in fixing them.

haberman 9y ago
I can say that I'm much more receptive to hearing this from someone in the industry (like you) than to hear one industry pointing fingers at another. The news industry invented the 24 hour news cycle, and the exploiting people's fear and outrage to keep their attention fixed on all of the worst, link-baity events that happen every day. The article talks about Eighth Graders and how 10 hours a week online makes them less happy; what about people who spend that much time watching the news? I'd wager that a lot of the negative feelings people get from spending too much time online come from reading too much news (and social media reactions to news). This creates an unfounded feeling that the world is falling apart compared to how it was 10 or 20 years ago, when by most objective measures the world is getting better. So I can acknowledge that there are problems, while simultaneously feeling a bit unwilling to be demonized in this way by the New York Times.

wpietri 9y ago

I am torn between my desire to see the numerous legitimate criticisms of the tech industry given deeper consideration and irritation at the eternally lazy way David "Applebee's salad bar" Brooks tackles anything. The "destroying the young" thing is especially tiresome. Every new thing has been destroying the young. That's true at least as far back as the novel [1], and probably back to prehistory when elders complained that fire was making kids soft, what with their "cooking" and their "warmth". It's also deeply self-defeating of him to be complaining about the lack of "cohesion" and "focused attention" in a sub-1000-word opinion piece that tries to make a half-dozen points, none particularly well. And all that in a daily newspaper, which is built to contain small amount of a great variety of things, and which makes a lot of its money from distracting its readers with ads. [2] [1] e.g, point 4 of http://mentalfloss.com/article/52209/15-historical-complaints-about-young-people-ruining-everything http://mentalfloss.com/article/52209/15-historical-complaint... and https://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/when-novels-were-bad-for-you/ https://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/when-novels-wer... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/business/media/new-york-times-earnings.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/business/media/new-york-t...

deleted 9y ago
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notacoward 9y ago
> the eternally lazy way David "Applebee's salad bar" Brooks tackles anything. Which leads to the question: how evil is David Brooks? How much of our time has he wasted? How many minds has he warped? How many Evil Empire agenda items has he helped to push? I'd say very few in tech have done as much harm as he has.

ab89b176cb5d 9y ago

"Tech" is not technology. Nobody hates TCP/IP or neural networks. What people rightly fear is unaccountable power held by software companies. If you are an engineer, you can help by respecting the people who use what you build. Show people the content they want to see, not the content that maximizes revenue. Refuse to experiment and collect data without the informed consent of the people you target. Build systems with the knowledge that every centralized service will eventually be compromised. Even if it's harder to build, harder to debug, and harder to monetize, build technology that is "good" instead of "evil" and the world will be better off.

zaarn 9y ago

>The first is that it is destroying the young. >The second critique of the tech industry is that it is causing [...] addiction on purpose, to make money >The third critique is that Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook are near monopolies that use their market power to invade the private lives of their users and impose unfair conditions on content creators and smaller competitors I agree with all three of these, though I think this is fixable. They obvious and easy solution is to pick apart the giants. The EU's ePrivacy Law and GDPR make this possible, in addition to Germany's NdG making it difficult for large social network to operate compared to small ones. The solution, in my opinions, is federated networks like Mastodon. Mastodon Server Operators have little incentive to abuse their users since the users will happily just swarm to another instance. Once they have figured out portable profiles, this becomes even easier. Federation solves these problems by detaching the user from a specific operator.

thanatropism 9y ago
Mastodon is one technical solution -- it makes me think of space exploration through Lagrange points. But have you figured out how to make it an actual solution?
- zaarn 9y ago
  I'm working on solutions as a side project and there are other projects in the space too. All it takes is for one of them to succeed.

hjorthjort 9y ago

There is a lot of statistics about how social media causes depression/unhappiness in the article. But I didn't see sources, and from what I can tell (without looking at the studies) it's just a correlation. I do believe social media impacts depression rates and creates some unhappiness, but the claims in the article seem unsupported. Surely, depressed kids would have spent more time alone in all ages, hanging out in their room, watching TV, maybe reading. Honestly, even if social media made you HAPPIER, I'd expect unhappy eight graders to spend more time on social media than those with a sunnier disposition.

oh-kumudo 9y ago

Very evil apparently. Tech is the greediest industry at this point, even comparing with Wall Street, all under the philosophy of GROWTH. Too many pretentious people get into this industry to chase the hot money, it slowly degrades to this toxic, selfish, out of touch culture, that benefits no one except the tech people and their pocket. Worst of all, they lack the blessing of self-consciousness to see it. Tech is changing the world, but it probably not making the world a better place.

AstralStorm 9y ago
Real means now needed is material progress. Energy progress. Fixing backwards places in the world. Political progress. Ecological and economical too. Medical perhaps. Apparently this is not quick buck enough. Information revolution can only go so far. Many of the alleged tech companies are not innovative at all.
jgh 9y ago
Couldn't agree more. Similarly with the commenter who has been voted to the top. The tech industry isn't a great look right now.

pgl 9y ago

I think the question should really be, "How Evil Are The People In Control Of Tech?"

palad1n 9y ago

>Imagine if instead of claiming to offer us the best things in life, tech merely saw itself as providing efficiency devices. Hear hear.

TrickyRick 9y ago

Does make me wonder, will we look back at this time of unregulated tech companies and social media in 50 years the way we look back at unregulated sale and advertisement of tobacco today?

platinumrad 9y ago
I honestly find "tech" to be way too broad of a label and only really see major problems with social media and fintech. Juciero-type companies are stupid, sure, but they're not hurting anyone. Instagram and Twitter, on the other hand, are likely strong net negatives for society. Edit: Microtransaction-based games that are essentially gambling simulators are highly problematic as well.
- TrickyRick 9y ago
  Yeah, I guess that unlike the tobacco industry there are actually parts of this industry that do something positive for the world. Perhaps Big Social is a better term, or Big Gaming (AKA the AAA Industry...) depending on what problem you want to focus on.

gerardnll 9y ago

What's evil are the minds behind the tech.

diyseguy 9y ago
They were cultivated by a system that encourages them to treat life as a game where money is the points that decides who wins. Human values like ethics are pesky speedbumps that get in the way of maximizing greed.

dredmorbius 9y ago

Addressing a few points raised in comments: 1. The drumbeat of criticism against major information-technology-centric, largely media-based firms, has been palpably increasing. As a long-term critic, this is oddly disconcerting. Calls for regulation are increasing in the US and elsewhere. Critics include numerous former (and some current) employees, or executives, of major tech companies, including Sean Parker, former president of Facebook. 2. The dynamics and interactions of media, the public, tribalistic impulses, and politics (as well as other phenomena) are an ancient study, though one apparently not much focused on by many working in information technology: programmers, system architects, sysadmins, DBAs, network engineers, designers, UI/UX specialists, product managers, etc. Which is ironic because that really is our melieu. There's a very large literature on this topic and I very much recommend getting up to speed on the topic. MOOC ICS has a good, fast-paced introduction. I've been commenting on HN and elsewhere of my own explorations: Robert McChesny, Noam Chomsky, I.F. Stone, Marshall McLuhan, H.L. Mencken, Walter Lippmann, Gustav la Bon, Davic MacKay, Cicero, Aristotle, and Plato are among the authors I'd recommend. First video (apologies, I cannot find the playlist link): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhGPbjxy2F8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhGPbjxy2F8 3. "Technology" is a tremendously unsatisfactory term for the many meanings and connotations we give it. It's become synonymous in large part with "inforamtion technology" (though writ broadly it concerns far more). But if you do look at information technology, that field can largely be divided in two: media, directed at collecting and directing information from and to people, and cybernetics, directed at monitoring and managing non-human systems (including technical, engineering, financial, and governmental systems). Looking at each of these more closely even those distinctions start disappearing over the underlying similarities. But the upshot is that a tremendous amount of what "technology" is is really the new "media". And yes, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Wordpress, Spotify, Snapchat, and similar companies are largely media or communications companies in the same sense that Western Union, AT&T, RCA, CNN, or Time-Life Publishing, are. But bigger, faster, and with orders of magnitude more audience. And the less-directly-media-oriented companies -- Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft -- still have media-like components, though they play in other spaces as well. 4. The current tech giants didn't invent disinformation, misinformation, distraction, propaganda, and manipulation. But they've made it vastly more powerful, targeted, sophisticated, large, and rapidly-evolving. They've also denied this up and down and blue for years, with all the credibility of the lead, asbestos, tobacco, automobile, CFC, coal, and oil industries. Which is to say: nil. Not inventing a problem doesn't mean you're not embodying or exacerbating it.

yannis7 9y ago

just another attempt by the witch-hunting media trash to portray tech people as the "new bankers". it is amazing how similar those "respectable" metropolitan left-wing newspapers are to their populist-right counterparts: for the latter "immigrants are gonna take your jobs and globalists are evil" and the former "robots are gonna take your jobs and techies are evil".

megaman22 9y ago

Literally my job is to make software that increases productivity, in a blatantly Taylorist sense, for a segment of business that is almost universally considered a cost center. More throughput with less people, and ideally the software enables using the cheapest people possible. I'm tasked with creating metrics that line-managers can use to drive their workers like oarslaves on a corsair galley. In a perfect world, from the business' perspective, I'd utterly replace the people with some conglomeration of AI buzzwords that could do the job at 65% of the efficiency of a human, at less than the cost of one minimum wage salary.

Nicholas7900 9y ago

Hacking a phone or a computer does not depend on programming language, but exploit the existing vulnerabilities. If you mean by create Windows virus/trojan/malware, them are generally written in Visual C++ (VC++), and you can learn it by buying books for basic knowledge and go to practice. so i think adrian lamo uses c plus or v plus for hacking. I don't know why every one talk about Nicholas Shields, I'm not the only Hacker online, but if you like to know what hackers use i can tell you , to hacking web site for example you need script python or Perl or ruby ... but its not the important part because first you should know what you will do and then it will be easy because maybe you will found some code in the internet like here Exploits Database by Offensive Security , so there is a different between someone who hack by using tools and code already done and someone who found "zero days" bugs and expel hacking. Well, if you wish to contact me for hacking issues : compositehacks@gmail.com

skrebbel 9y ago

Somewhat a tangent, but "How evil is tech" is a nice Trumpian headline. Looks like NYT is catching up with the times. By formulating is like this, NYT implies that everybody agrees that "tech" is evil to some extent, and that the only discussion is about exactly how evil "tech" is. Don't forget that NYT is in pretty direct competition with some companies they call "tech". This article is not unlike Coca-Cola publishing a press release titled "How evil is Pepsi?". (Note, I did not share any opinion about whether "tech" is evil and I don't necessarily disagree with the premise of the article. I'm just trying to highlight that this kind of writing appears to be the new baseline and it's not just fake news and the alt right who do it anymore and that bothers the crap out of me because I feel like I can't trust anyone anymore)

Ygg2 9y ago
> "How evil is tech" is a nice Trumpian headline. Looks like NYT is catching up with the times. What makes you think it needed to catch up at all? Look, press/media, tech, and any industry out there are there to "Make world a better place... for themselves".
- meebs 9y ago
  > any industry out there are there to "Make world a better place... for themselves". Under capitalism, at least. :)

microcolonel 9y ago

I swear, if 00s and 10s Silicon Valley ruins the freedoms enjoyed by the computing industry by being short-sighted, it will be the greatest grudge I hold in life.

oldandtired 9y ago

Technology of any kind is not inherently evil, not guns, computers, genetic manipulation, not even nuclear bombs. Evil only arises when man uses and formulates technology for evil purposes. Too often, people get "a bee in their bonnets" over some form of technology when it is abused and misused by other people. They don't separate the tool from the tool user and associate evil with the tool. Sometimes there is a case for not developing some form of technology because the development requires the destruction and damage to people and the environment. Here the problem is still people not the technology itself.

ndh2 9y ago
This is a bit of a slippery slope. Take gas chambers for example. We all know what they were designed to do, and what they were used to. So was it ok to design them, because only those who used them were at fault? Was it ok to build them? Was it ok to execute the command of pushing the button, because you didn't issue the command? Who's at fault here? Why is it ok to design and build algorithms that make people unhappy?
- TulliusCicero 9y ago
  I mean, how much harm has to be done before some tech is unethical? Take World of Warcraft, for instance: no one will dispute that the game was designed to keep you playing a very long time, and that many players were (are) addicted and wasted an excessive amount of time on the game, many people lost jobs, got kicked out of school, even ended marriages. That's real damage. But, many people also simply enjoyed the game, spent time with friends, one of my old school buddies even found his wife playing the game. So, was creating WoW an unethical move on the developers' part?
- vorpalhex 9y ago
  Before the gas chamber was the firing squad. Before that was the noose, the axe, and the guillotine. Humans have a long history of killing each other, and typically over time (with a few exceptions such as the electric chair) the methods have generally gotten more humane (if state sanctioned punishment resulting in death can ever be considered humane) and when those methods failed to be available, no human government has ever held off on using a more barbaric act of killing in it's place. Technology will either evolve without us, or less humane methods will continue to be used. Progress is both a promise and a threat.

JudasGoat 9y ago

Has anyone thought of making a nanny type app that would set "healthy limits" on time spent on social media and news. I don't think we can rely on facebook to tell users what is healthy, when it is unhealthy to their revenue.

jondubois 9y ago

Most big tech companies are evil to some extent though they also do some good too. I've worked for a few and I can rarely stick around for longer than 6 months. It just doesn't feel right to me. It's obviously a zero-sum game. It feels like executives are slowly turning the knobs and making companies more and more evil over time but doing so at a slow enough rate that nobody pays attention to it. The hypocrisy of some big companies is that they promote themselves as being against any form of violence, aggression or discrimination but a large part of their business is about mentally abusing people and creating inequality.

diyseguy 9y ago

meh. individuals will eventually figure it out for themselves. we don't need nannies. something tells me this sort of argument will get used to prop up anti net neutrality arguments.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

foxhop 9y ago

I ranted a couple days ago about the evils of what has become of cryptocurrency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15746019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15746019