3 ms·
The quality of the service for every one of the positive examples you mention has degraded since the largest firms involved have become effective monopolies tha
by advael 5y ago
The quality of the service for every one of the positive examples you mention has degraded since the largest firms involved have become effective monopolies that could get away with exploiting either their customers or their labor, or both, while also engaging in anti-competitive practices to destroy real and even potential competitors, destructively capturing large swaths of the free market in the process. The centrality and engagement-driving nature of social platforms, including youtube, have eroded the social fabric and aided the spread of conspiracy theories and political extremism, driven advances in mass-surveillance, or both. All user-generated content platforms have centralized and then adopted abusable automated moderation systems that exacerbate these problems.
Big tech has created some undeniable conveniences, and it provides an endless stream of content that entertains you as it distracts you, as you describe, but if you think that's worth the major problems the consolidation of its power has caused, you're a fool. If you haven't encountered any of the myriad ways in which this, like any consolidation of unaccountable power, is harming people, then you live in a very lucky and ever-shrinking bubble. But perhaps you have, and simply decided that this was the tradeoff for the shiny toys listed.
Maybe humanity will always live in a cycle of worshiping new unaccountable power bases for the scraps they feed them, until the dystopia they create becomes too horrible to bear, and some awful upheaval has to happen to upset it. Maybe this time the combination of surveillance technology and near-total capture of both retail and information sources, is too powerful and this can't be reversed. Maybe the planet will be uninhabitable by the time it can happen.