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A lot of people seem to believe that there’s much more to this than there really is. Google has hired a bunch of 28 year old kids in HR and PR, that never used

A lot of people seem to believe that there’s much more to this than there really is. Google has hired a bunch of 28 year old kids in HR and PR, that never used Usenet, that never used IRC, that barely remember AIM, that had a smartphone before they had their own laptop, that don’t understand the internet or technology. And they’re the ones making these decisions. There aren’t rooms full of Google PMs and programmers and engineers debating the implications. It’s 3 or 4 kids in-between the ages of 24 and 34, and that room is increasingly technically illiterate, and increasingly unable to imagine an internet before (or after) FAANG hegemony. This isn’t Google being evil to protect advertising dollars, or to kill Matrix, etc. It’s google hiring young, unimaginative, uninteresting social justice warriors. We’ve taken for granted that most of the people working in FAANG have been using computers for longer than these companies existed. That’s no longer really the case, and the attitudes of these companies are going to continue to change further and further from the unique values that the industry used to represent. In ten years it’s going to be worse, and in 30 it’s going to be unrecognizable.

walrus01 6y ago
If you want to get away from those sort of 28 year olds - go work in core engineering for an ISP. The sort of persons who are entrusted with admin access on the big, expensive, vitally critical Cisco and Juniper boxes that run a medium to large sized ISP are pretty much the opposite of the raised-on-shiny-GUI persons you describe. However I think it's unfair to say that people under age 40 are 'social justice warriors'. They've been raised in a bubble of superficial user interfaces and have never been forced to encounter the fundamental underpinnings of the software and Internet.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
swiley 6y ago
TL;DR: Google has likely delegated policing everyone's PCs to a handful of incompetent children and that should make you feel less worried. Smartphones are bad. "Apps" are bad. OS vendors using their position to change public behavior is bad. (this last idea something the courts in most countries agree on.) You need to get this stuff out of your life, it's beyond coke levels of harmful.
AWildC182 6y ago
I'm in that age bracket, I remember the open internet. I wouldn't get super ageist about it, but I think the point still stands. Google just wants to believe the internet is for megacorps and everyone who isn't on a mega platform doesn't belong connected to it.
shrimp_emoji 6y ago
There are plenty of people under 30 more of the "hacker" æsthetic, who independently adopt Linux and have a seething contempt for social media and streaming titans and data hoard and play Dwarf Fortress and roguelikes and what have you. Some of them are even in the disaffected, alt-right or anti-SJW crowd[0] (but those are generally more like under 20, I think). The ones who live on their phones and Macbooks and don't understand technology are normies, of which there are more since CS has become much more popularized and pop-culturally embraced, I think. There's plenty of those in their 50s and above, too, just less-so at FAANGs. 0: https://www.youtube.com/c/LukeSmithxyz/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/LukeSmithxyz/videos
johnisgood 6y ago
I am around 25, and I remember all that and loved it. I miss it terribly. I do not like this trend and direction. Quite scary, to be honest.
pnw_hazor 6y ago
Not unlike the CCP.
- kubanczyk 6y ago
  It's a second comment in this thread like this. I'm not a native speaker and it's hard to tell whether CCP is supposed to be: - CCCP a cyrillic of SSSR? - CCP, Chinese Communist Party? - CCP, the cyclic something peptide, which is a top websearch hit for me?
  - COGlory 6y ago
    Chinese Communist Party
prohobo 6y ago
You have a point, but it's not entirely that. For one, the boomers are the ones who still own everything, and they've never given over leadership roles down to the next generations. There's a combination of a certain subset of millennials who are like this, and the leadership that doesn't care and wants everything to go their way (as it always has). A large part is also that the mainstream internet is still so new, and people are so poorly educated that they don't understand that they're the bad guys.

walrus01 6y ago

If you want to get away from those sort of 28 year olds - go work in core engineering for an ISP. The sort of persons who are entrusted with admin access on the big, expensive, vitally critical Cisco and Juniper boxes that run a medium to large sized ISP are pretty much the opposite of the raised-on-shiny-GUI persons you describe. However I think it's unfair to say that people under age 40 are 'social justice warriors'. They've been raised in a bubble of superficial user interfaces and have never been forced to encounter the fundamental underpinnings of the software and Internet.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

swiley 6y ago

TL;DR: Google has likely delegated policing everyone's PCs to a handful of incompetent children and that should make you feel less worried. Smartphones are bad. "Apps" are bad. OS vendors using their position to change public behavior is bad. (this last idea something the courts in most countries agree on.) You need to get this stuff out of your life, it's beyond coke levels of harmful.

AWildC182 6y ago

I'm in that age bracket, I remember the open internet. I wouldn't get super ageist about it, but I think the point still stands. Google just wants to believe the internet is for megacorps and everyone who isn't on a mega platform doesn't belong connected to it.

shrimp_emoji 6y ago

There are plenty of people under 30 more of the "hacker" æsthetic, who independently adopt Linux and have a seething contempt for social media and streaming titans and data hoard and play Dwarf Fortress and roguelikes and what have you. Some of them are even in the disaffected, alt-right or anti-SJW crowd[0] (but those are generally more like under 20, I think). The ones who live on their phones and Macbooks and don't understand technology are normies, of which there are more since CS has become much more popularized and pop-culturally embraced, I think. There's plenty of those in their 50s and above, too, just less-so at FAANGs. 0: https://www.youtube.com/c/LukeSmithxyz/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/LukeSmithxyz/videos

johnisgood 6y ago

I am around 25, and I remember all that and loved it. I miss it terribly. I do not like this trend and direction. Quite scary, to be honest.

pnw_hazor 6y ago

Not unlike the CCP.

kubanczyk 6y ago
It's a second comment in this thread like this. I'm not a native speaker and it's hard to tell whether CCP is supposed to be: - CCCP a cyrillic of SSSR? - CCP, Chinese Communist Party? - CCP, the cyclic something peptide, which is a top websearch hit for me?
- COGlory 6y ago
  Chinese Communist Party

prohobo 6y ago

You have a point, but it's not entirely that. For one, the boomers are the ones who still own everything, and they've never given over leadership roles down to the next generations. There's a combination of a certain subset of millennials who are like this, and the leadership that doesn't care and wants everything to go their way (as it always has). A large part is also that the mainstream internet is still so new, and people are so poorly educated that they don't understand that they're the bad guys.